Zamyatin’s We: A Collection Of Critical Essays 0882338048, 9780882338040

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction. The Ultimate Anti-Utopia......Page 10
I. The Soviet View......Page 24
1. Alexander Voronsky: Evgeny Zamyatin......Page 26
2. Viktor Shklovsky: Evgeny Zamyatin’s Ceiling......Page 50
3. M. M. Kuznetsov: Evgeny Zamyatin......Page 52
4. O. N. Mikhailov: Zamyatin......Page 57
II. Mythic Criticism......Page 60
5. Richard A. Gregg: Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and We......Page 62
6. Christopher Collins: Zamyatin’s We as Myth......Page 71
7. Owen Ulph: I-330: Reconsiderations on the Sex of Satan......Page 81
III. Aesthetics......Page 94
8. Carl R. Proffer: Notes on the Imagery in Zamyatin’s We......Page 96
9. Ray Parrott: The Eye in We......Page 107
10. Gary Kern: Zamyatin’s Stylization......Page 119
11. Milton Ehre: Zamyatin’s Aesthetics......Page 131
12. Susan Layton: Zamyatin and Literary Modernism......Page 141
13. Leighton Brett Cooke: Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin's We......Page 150
IV. Influences and Comparisons......Page 170
14. Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor: A Neglected Source of Zamyatin’s We......Page 172
Addendum: “The New Utopia” by Jerome K. Jerome......Page 174
15. Kathleen Lewis & Harry Weber: Zamyatin’s We, the Proletarian Poets and Bogdanov’s Red Star......Page 187
16. E. J. Brown: Brave New World, 1984 & We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia......Page 210
17. John J. White: Mathematical Imagery in Musil’s Young Törless and Zamyatin's We......Page 229
18. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: Zamyatin and the Strugatskys: The Representation of Freedom in We and The Snail on the Slope......Page 237
New Zamyatin Materials......Page 262
1. The Presentists (1918)......Page 264
2. Four Letters to Lev Lunts (1923-24)......Page 267
3. A Letter from Ilya Ehrenburg (1926)......Page 273
4. Excerpts from Unpublished Letters to his Wife (1929-30)......Page 274
5. The Modern Russian Theater (1931)......Page 278
6. The Future of the Theater (1931)......Page 291
7. Auto-Interview (1932)......Page 296
Sources......Page 302
Bibliography for Further Reading......Page 306

Citation preview

ZAMYATIN’S WE A Collection of Critical Essay Edited & Introduced by Gary Kern

Ardis, Ann Arbor

Gary Kern, Zamyatin's We Copyright © 1988 by Ardis Publishers All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Printed in the United States of America

Ardis Publishers 2901 Heatherway Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Zamiatin's We. Bibliography: p. 1. Zamiatin, Evgenii Ivanovich, 1884-1937. My. 1. Kern, Gary. PG3476.Z34M938 1988 891.73’42 88-3502 ISBN 0-88233-804-8 (alk. paper)

Contents

Introduction

9

THE SOVIET VIEW

I.

23

1.

Alexander Voronsky: Evgeny Zamyatin

2.

Viktor Shklovsky: Evgeny Zamyatin’s Ceiling

3.

M. M. Kuznetsov: Evgeny Zamyatin

4.

O. N. Mikhailov: Zamyatin

II.

MYTHIC CRITICISM

25 49

51

56

59

5.

Richard A. Gregg: Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and We 61

6.

Christopher Collins: Zamyatin’s We as Myth

7.

Owen Ulph: I-330: Reconsiderations on the Sex of Satan

III.

AESTHETICS

70 80

93

8.

Carl R. Proffer: Notes on the Imagery in Zamyatin’s We

9.

Ray Parrott: The Eye in We

106

10.

Gary Kern: Zamyatin’s Stylization

11.

Milton Ehre: Zamyatin’s Aesthetics

12.

Susan Layton: Zamyatin and Literary Modernism

118

130 140

95

13.

Leighton Brett Cooke: Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin's We 149

IV.

INFLUENCES AND COMPARISONS

14.

Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor: A Neglected Source of Zamyatin’s We 171 Addendum: “The New Utopia” by Jerome K. Jerome 173

15.

Kathleen Lewis & Harry Weber: Zamyatin’s We, the Proletarian Poets and Bogdanov’s Red Star 186

16.

E. J. Brown: Brave New World, 1984 & We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia 209

17.

John J. White: Mathematical Imagery in Musil’s Young Törless and Zamyatin's We 228

18.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: Zamyatin and the Strugatskys: The Representation of Freedom in We and The Snail on the Slope 236

New Zamyatin Materials:

169

261

263

1.

The Presentists (1918)

2.

Four Letters to Lev Lunts (1923-24)

266

3.

A Letter from Ilya Ehrenburg (1926)

272

4.

Excerpts from Unpublished Letters to his Wife (1929-30)

5.

The Modern Russian Theater (1931)

6.

The Future of the Theater (1931)

7.

Auto-Interview (1932)

Sources

295

301

Bibliography for Further Reading

305

277

290

273

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications for permission to reprint copyright material: Slavic Review: Richard A. Gregg, “Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and We” (No. 4, 1965).

Slavic and East European Journal: Carl R. Proffer, “Notes on the Imag­ ery in Zamjatin's We” (No. 3, 1963); Milton Ehre, “Zamjatin’s Aesthetics” (No. 3, 1975); Susan Layton, "Zamjatin and Literary Modernism” (No. 3, 1973); Christopher Collins, “Zamjatin’s We as Myth” (No. 2, 1966). Comparative Literature: John J. White, “Mathematical Imagery in Musil’s Young Törless and Zamyatin’s We” XVIII (1966). Russian Review: Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor, “A Neglected Source of Zamiatin’s Novel ‘We’” (No. 2, 1973). Other published essays and materials first appeared in Russian Literature Triquarterly, published by Ardis. All sources are listed at the back of the book.

INTRODUCTION THE ULTIMATE ANTI-UTOPIA

Nearly seven decades since it was written, the novel We (Russian title, My) remains an exciting and influential work of science fiction, political satire and experimental prose. Its basic plot, whereby a true believer comes to question the validity of a totalitarian state and thus to transform it from a utopia into an anti-utopia, has been repeated by Aldous Huxley (coincidentally) in Brave New World (1932), George Orwell (consciously) in Nineteen Eighty Four (1948) and dozens of writers and film-makers (unknowingly) in the fifties, sixties and seventies; yet its artistry, prophetic power and underlying philosophy remain unsurpassed. Although it makes a statement against the perma­ nence of any human achievement, We has established itself as the most significant anti-utopian novel of the century. Zamyatin finished the novel in 1920 and sent it the next year to the Grzhebin House in Berlin, which published books simultaneously in Germany and Russia. In Petrograd (later Leningrad), the work became known to fellow writers by means of author’s readings, such as the one Zamyatin gave the Union of Writers in 1924. Publication was announced, but never realized in Russia: the book has the distinction of being the first novel banned by the Glavlit (Chief Administration for Literary Affairs), established in 1922. As this censorship board was understood at that time to be a prophylactic rather than corrective device—to block publication of pornography and works of an overtly counterrevolutionary nature, there can be no doubt about the reception of We by Soviet officialdom. It was little short of treason. For this reason the first publication was in English, in a translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924. Three years later, when the book was considered for transla­ tion into Czech, Marc Slonim, then the editor of Volia Rossii, a Russian emigre journal in Prague, obtained the original and published it, palm­ ing it off as a translation into Russian from Czech. (He tried to mask the original by changing some words.) This foreign publication provided the basis for attacks on Zamyatin at home as an anti-Soviet writer. He was vilified in the press, and his books and plays were banned. Zamyatin answered the charges point for point with customary 9

10

Introduction

frankness and irony in a letter to the Union of Writers, and resigned from the chairmanship of the Leningrad branch. But he had to recog­ nize that the “death sentence” for a writer—not to be able to write—had been passed upon him. The systematic newspaper campaigns and the ban on publication made continued creative activity in Russia unthinkable. He therefore took the bold step of writing directly to Stalin, as did Mikhail Bulgakov at about the same time. Acknowledging his “very inconvenient habit of saying not what is expedient at a given moment, but what strikes me as the truth,” Zamyatin asked to be de­ ported from the country. With Maxim Gorky’s intercession, Zamyatin and his wife were permitted to emigrate to Paris. Once abroad, he shunned emigre circles, wrote interesting articles on the theater and a few film scenarios (including one of We), and, like so many emigres, hoped to return to his homeland. Zamyatin died in March, 1937. His death went unmentioned in the Soviet press, and his funeral was attended by only a few friends.

Texts

The original Russian manuscript of We has not come to light. In 1952 the Chekhov Publishing House of New York City brought out a Russian-language edition, presumably based on the text sent to New York in 1921 (by Zamyatin?) for an English translation. But if so, altera­ tions of type styles, spellings and so on may still have been made. Since the Czech publication was intentionally defaced, and in any event is not readily available, the Chekhov edition has become the standard, if not canonical, source for the original. (The 1967 Inter-Library Literary Associates publication is simply a photocopy of the Chekhov edition.) Possibly the author’s manuscript lies in a Soviet archive or in the estate of Ludmilla Zamyatin awaiting the attention of a lucky textologist. As of this writing, four English translations have appeared. The first, the aforementioned effort of Zilboorg, was brought out by Dutton in 1924 and reprinted in 1952 with various covers. Dr. Zilboorg was an interesting man who also translated Paracelsus from Old German; his version of Zamyatin is accurate and retains some of the spirit of the twenties, but today seems old-fashioned and lifeless. The translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, included in An Anthology of Russian Litera­ ture in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak (Vintage, 1960) and republished separately (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), has much more zip; it finds imaginative equivalents, invents words, uses different print styles and even tosses in footnotes from a “Venusian

Introduction

11

investigator.” It best captures the hectic, mind-boggling pace of the original, but is not very reliable for the purpose of literary analysis. This distinction goes to the third translation, that by Mirra Ginsburg (Bantam, 1972), which steers a middle road between the stiffness of Zilboorg and the excesses of Guerney. It is the most reliable for classroom use. A new, fourth translation by S. D. Cioran was just published by Ardis in Russian Literature of the 1920s (1987).

Plot It is assumed that purchasers of the present book will be familiar with the contents of We, but perhaps a plot synopsis will prove a useful reminder. The chief characters are the following: D503—engineer, builder of the spaceship Integral. I-330—a leader of the revolutionary movement Mephi. 0-90—a sexual partner of D-503. U—the controller at D-503’s apartment building. R-13—a poet, D-503's friend. S-4711—a Guardian interested in D-503. Scissor-lips—a physician and co-conspirator with I-330. The Benefactor—Head of the One State.

The action takes place in the thirtieth century, a thousand years after the world has been subjugated to the rule of the single state and human life in all its particulars has come to be regulated by scientific reason. This reason is manifested in the omnipotence of "The One State,” guided by the omniscience of the one man, the "Benefactor.” One of the instruments of control, the “Table of Hourly Commandments,” schedules the daily activities of waking, working, eating, defecation, sleep, and is understood as the mathematical guarantee of happiness. For a person to be happy, it is reasoned, "the denominator in the fraction of happiness. . . [must be] reduced to zero,” that is, freedom must be eliminated. Freedom is seen as the slow murder of a society, mathematically much worse than the physical murder of one man. With freedom standing at zero, there is no inequality, no reason for envy, and the nominator—namely, whatever the state permits—becomes infinite by comparison. Thus the rule of the One State obtains divine force. So that this happiness not be threatened by freedom, all houses are made of glass. This facilitates the work of the “Bureau of Guardians,” special agents who watch the citizens to ensure their unin-

12

Introduction

terrupted tranquility. All work is performed as a group activity, and all group activities are regimented to ensure unanimity of thought and action. The organization “splits into separate cells” only twice a day, when citizens may stay alone at home. The Table of Hourly Command­ ments allows for this by scheduling sexual activity on certain days at this time. Each male citizen, designated by a consonant and odd num­ ber at birth instead of by a name, may draw a ticket for any available vowel and even number, i.e., female citizen, for use at this time. Only on “Sexual Days,” during the “Personal Hours,” may shades be drawn in the glass houses. Parenthood, as well as love, obtains a mathematical basis with the “Maternal and Paternal Norms.” The Personal Hours, however, are felt to be a flaw in the equation of happiness, conducive to anxiety, and at the beginning of the account it is hoped that eventually every second of every citizen’s existence will be planned by the One State. The thoughts of the numbers are protected by the one newspaper, “The State Gazette,” and “The Institute of the State Poets and Writers,” both of which glorify the One State and the Benefactor. The One State itself, situated in an undefined area of the globe, is protected from the vicissitudes of weather by a glass dome and a glass wall, beyond which nature still exists in a savage state. The story is told by the diary of D-503. His first entry explains that he is the chief engineer in the construction of a spaceship designed to carry the message of reason to other worlds. His diary is in fact part of the cargo. Addressing his unknown readers, D-503 compares the life in the One State with that of ancient times (i.e., our own). He demons­ trates the superior quality of the Table of Hourly Commandments over the apex of ancient literature, “The Time Table of All the Railroads,” and marvels that people once lived chaotically, without obligatory walks, without predetermined sexual hours. “Like beasts, they bore offspring blindly. Isn’t it ludicrous—to know horticulture, poultry culture, pisciculture . . . and yet to be unable to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: pediculture. To be unable to think out the logical conclusions: our Maternal and Paternal Norms.” Explaining the origin of the One State, D-503 tells of a two-hundred year war and the development of a new naphtha food which eradicated 99.8% of the world population: “But then, cleansed of its millennial filth, how shining the face of the earth became." D-503’s satisfaction with the One State is challenged by the appearance of I-330, a disturbing woman with disturbing ideas. Her black clothing of a former time, her smoking, her preference for the music of ancient composers over that produced by the state

Introduction

13

music-making boxes, and especially her sarcastic manner excite un­ familiar sensations in the mathematician. He becomes reflective, ex­ periences the ancient disorder of dreams, commits the crime of not sleeping and even wonders if his knowledge is only faith. At first he is reassured by the warm breath of the Guardian Angel on the back of his neck, but day by day he falls deeper into doubt. Even his mathematical certainty—“Eternally in love are two times two, forever combined in a passionate four”—is upset by the notion of irrational numbers, suggest­ ing an unknown chasm into which he is falling. At last he understands that he is in love with I-330 and is afflicted with the disease of having a soul. After an unprecedented demonstration of opposition at the "Day of Unanimity” (the traditional re-election of the Benefactor), I-330 takes D-503 beyond the Green Wall, where he sees primitive people and learns of the revolutionary movement. This sets the stage for the main philosophical statement of the novel: “There can't be a revolution ... our revolution ... was the last." “My dear, you’re a mathematician ... Name the last number for me." "... That's absurd. Since the number of numbers is infinite, why would you want the last?" "Well, and why would you want the last revolution? There is no last, revolutions are infinite."

The revolutionary attempt to seize the spaceship fails, but D-503 is not implicated. As the epidemic of the soul spreads, the Medical Bureau perfects a device to remove the faculty of imagination—the last obsta­ cle to complete happiness. The operation becomes mandatory for all numbers under penalty of liquidation by the “Machine of the Benefactor.” After painful hesitation, D-503 submits to the “fantasiectomy” and betrays his former lover. I-330 is tortured and sentenced to the Machine. D-503, returned to the fold, regrets the revolution and ends as he began: “And I hope—we will conquer. More: I am certain—we shall conquer. For reason should conquer.” Within this plot, there are numerous subplots and subtleties. For example, one can follow the spread of the soul “epidemic” to other characters in contact with the love-smitten D-503: 0-90 falls in love with him, becomes jealous of I-330 and illegally conceives a child by him; U secretly reads his diary, falls in love with him and informs on the other revolutionaries, thus affecting the outcome of the story. One can ex­ plore the contrast between illusion and reality—D-503’s initial under­ standing of the state and the revolutionary movement, and his ultimate realization that he has been used by both. One can trace at least three

14

Introduction

levels of time in the diary: 1) the present tense—the story as it unfolds, 2) the future tense—the world lying one thousand years ahead, 3) the past tense—the story of conversion and brainwashing completed, the diary sent back through time from the 30th century to our own 20th century.

Interpretations

One of the marks of a great book is its susceptibility to many levels of interpretation, all apparently valid and convincing. We is such a book. It has been analyzed by American Slavists perhaps more than any other modern Russian novel; it has been picked to pieces by different, sometimes antithetical methods; yet it always holds up. Its appeal is not limited to Russian studies: We is commonly assigned in courses of political science, history, science fiction, utopian literature, and so on. In the classroom, it can be depended upon to excite students as few other books. First contact with We is invariably thrilling: the reader feels chal­ lenged and compelled to make his own analysis, often repeating observations printed in scholarly journals unknown to him. For this reason professors habitually photocopy one or two articles on We for their students. Such articles serve to refine the initial analy­ ses and to stimulate further discussion. This long-standing practice has inspired the present collection, which brings together the best of the old articles, some of the more exciting recent articles and a few other things as well. The intention is to provide a handy sourcebook for interpreta­ tions of Zamyatin—for professors, students and readers in the general public who explore on their own. The Soviet treatment of We is unfortunate, but instructive. Since the novel was banned in 1922, later critics were reluctant to show any familiarity with the original text. Instead, they relied on an essay written by Alexander Voronsky, editor of the first state-sponsored cultural-literary journal, Red Virgin Soil, and published in Moscow in 1922. Voronsky is generally regarded as a “moderate” Marxist critic of the twenties, but even so it is clear from the essay that with him ideolo­ gy came first and literary analysis second. In the essay, he delivers a bitter denunciation of Zamyatin’s life and work, but also cites long por­ tions of the novel. The historical respectability of Red Virgin Soil and Voronsky’s negative assessment of Zamyatin made this essay the ideal source for subsequent critics. They, in effect, implied that it was proper for Voronsky to read and interpret the work in his time, but no one afterwards should dare touch the poisonous thing. While seconding

Introduction

15

Voronsky, they avoided mention of the fact that he had been sent to Siberia and perished in the purges. He was, however, posthumously rehabilitated, and to stress the importance of his essay, the Soviet publishing houses began to reprint it in 1963. It has not yet been sup­ planted by anything new during glasnost. The complete essay is in­ cluded here in an accurate English translation. Also included from the Soviet side are a sort of off-beat piece by Viktor Shklovsky, actually a critic very close to Zamyatin, but at that time in the process of making amends with the Soviet government, and two accounts from the sixties, interesting for their slight departures from Voronsky. Notes at the back of the book spell out these particulars. On the Western side, no single approach is dominant. Rather, as already suggested, a profusion of interests and methods prevails. Re­ lying on what seem to me the chief aims, I have collected articles into three categories, admittedly rather loose. The first, “Mythic criticism,” embraces the concerns of myth, religion and psychology. The second, “aesthetics,” focuses on analysis of themes, structures and devices. The last, “influence and comparisons,” explores influence on Zamyatin, coincidental expressions in other writers and Zamyatin’s influence on others. The essays are included in their entirety, which produces much overlapping, but also permits one to dip into the volume wherever he chooses and to read the articles in whatever order serves best. Zamyatin was not known to have made any special study of psychology, though he could not have failed to observe the European fascination with Freud during his stays in Germany and England. It seems fairly certain that he was unfamiliar with Jung’s works, which were not yet famous in Europe and virtually unknown in Russia. Nevertheless, We is as much a model of Jungian psychology as Her­ mann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, written in 1927 under the direct influence of Jung. This can be explained only by the fact that Zamyatin drew on the same psychic forces that Jung described. In Jungian terms, the hero of We is immediately recognizable as the persona—that aspect of the psyche which conforms to society, adheres to conventions, follows reason, presents a good face. I-330 appears as his anima, the hidden female side of this blocked personality, the source of spontaneity, irrationality, passions, dreams, love. It is she who awakens the unconscious. Thus aroused, D-503 discovers a wild, violent self, an impetuous, hairy-handed beast—his shadow. This process of awakening, which all men must confront or avoid, is what Jung called individuation, the discovery and conscious integration of the self within—the discovery of one’s soul. With Jung the proper outcome of this process is a self-sufficient and creative personality, but in the novel

16

Introduction

it is subverted by D-503’s fantasiectomy—with a definite artistic impact. The first critic to take up this line of interpretation is Christopher Collins, whose article “Zamyatin’s We as Myth” is included here. Both Jung and Zamyatin turn naturally to myth for the story of conscious awakening—Adam and Eve. D-503 assumes the role of Adam, I-330—Eve; she seduces him and takes him beyond the wall surrounding a paradise of unconscious happiness. The article which first examined the Adam-Eve premises of We—regarded as a classic by Zamyatin scholars—is Richard A. Gregg’s “Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible and We.” Its decoding of the characters’ names (or rather, designations) gives proof of the author’s and the critic’s devilish cleverness. A more recent look at the psycholo­ gical underpinnings of We, Owen Ulph's “I-330: Reconsiderations on the Sex of Satan,” drops the expected tone of scholarly respectability and plunges lustily into the heart of delicious sado-masochism. As with Nabokov, Zamyatin has the fire to ignite not only the critic’s literary interest, but his whole mind. Slavic studies in the sixties were largely concerned with the twen­ ties of Russian literature: this was still pretty much virgin territory, barely touched by translators and critics. While the classics of the nineteenth century were world famous and well worked by the previous generation of scholars, graduate students in the sixties, by turning to the early post-revolutionary literature of Russia, could discover exciting works and authors totally unknown to the general public. (At the same time in the Soviet Union a period of relaxed controls produced the "discovery” and publications of Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Mandelstam, etc.) One result of this development was the founding of Ardis, an American publishing enterprise devoted to Russian literature, which set off a veritable explosion of translations, articles and even first publica­ tions of original texts forty years old. Another was the phenomenal impact of Russian Formalism on students at this time. Nearly everyone was infected by it, and its influence endures to the present day. Reasons both intrinsic and extrinsic account for this. For the first, For­ malism offers a ready tool for literary analysis; the young scholar does not require the forbidding and sometimes fuzzy erudition of his profes­ sors in order to discuss the works he admires. With care and practice, he can pick a work apart and examine its components with precision and authority. For the second, the method fills up space and time; it enables the student to write his paper almost automatically, and the novice professor to explicate his text through the full hour. Its virtue lies in its avoidance of pompous statements of philosophy, religion or politics; its vice lies in relegating these concerns to the unspeakable,

Introduction

17

often categorizing the most heartfelt passages of a literary work as “padding,” “suspenseful retardation of plot” or “insertion of social material.” In short, Formalism in the sixties and beyond contains the same virtues and vices as it did in the twenties. Most of the articles gathered here under the rubric "Aesthetics” are touched to a greater or lesser degree by the Formalist persuasion. Their chief concern is the structural make-up of We. Accordingly, the early “Notes on the Imagery of We” by Carl Proffer looks at the color yellow through the novel. Ray Parrott looks at the eye as a basic image; he counts 160 instances of its usage. I attempt to break Zamyatin’s style down into language, imagery and theme. Milton Ehre takes on the task of describing Zamyatin’s aesthetic system. Susan Layton seeks out the elements of Zamyatin’s “Neorealism.” Leighton Brett Cooke makes a thorough investigation of the mathematical images and argu­ ments of the novel. All these individual approaches demonstrate that We achieved a complexity whereby the reader can take one perspec­ tive as his point of departure and profitably carry it through the whole work. As the Formalists were fond of saying, the "thing” became “organic.” Zamyatin was very well-read in Russian and foreign literature, par­ ticularly English. As the most talented essayist of post-revolutionary Russia, he naturally wrote about his reading, again providing material for the study of his novel. On the Russian side, critics usually name Gogol, Leskov, Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, The Grand Inquisitor), Remizov, Belyi (Petersburg), Bogdanov (Red Star) as influences. Zamyatin’s own “English works” should not be neglected: The Islanders (a novel), Fisher of Men (a story), The Society of Honor­ able Bell Ringers (a play)—these lampooned English stuffiness and sanctimony. Of foreign writers, Zamyatin admired Anatole France, Jack London, O. Henry and most of all H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Awakes); he wrote superb essays on each of these men. Zamyatin was an outstanding figure in post-revolutionary Russia who by his lectures, literary studies and creative works influenced a whole generation of writers, in particular, the Serapion Brothers, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Sobol, Yury Olesha. Despite the long interdiction against his works, his influence can be felt in the reawakened Russian fantasy of the sixties, particularly Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Vladimir Voino­ vich and the Strugatsky brothers. His influence in the West is widespread, but most often indirect—by way of Orwell. The articles in the last section of this collection look into the matter of influences and coincidences—such as the mathematical images in Musil’s novel Young Törless. They perform the useful service of proving

18

Introduction

Zamyatin’s kinship with other works by their wide and careful readings. While all credit Zamyatin with creating a seminal work of fiction, one or another of them takes a surprisingly critical approach to him. Contrary to Soviet aspersions, Western critics are not necessarily enamoured of Zamyatin’s philosophy and blinded by it to the quality of his artistic work. Certainly the most formidable assault on Zamyatin’s outlook is to be found not in Voronsky or later Soviet critics, who indulge in ideologic­ al invective, but in the essay by the dean of American Soviet Russian literary studies and longtime admirer of Zamyatin’s works: "Brave New World, 1984, and We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia” by Edward J. Brown. Contradicting almost all previous writing on Zamyatin, Brown asserts that the writer did not look to the future, but to the past. He consistently repudiated the city as a desirable place to live and found his preferred subjects in "the pre-civilized and the primitive." The hero and heroine of We try to escape the "conventions of their time” by running beyond the wall to primitive hairy creatures. Furthermore, Brown states, Zamyatin was not an original thinker: his thought is “a mixture of his basic roman­ ticism with modern scientific vocabulary and Hegelian dialectics,” the latter being picked up as part and parcel of his time. Brown regards Zamyatin’s philosophy as an "artificial intellectual superstructure" de­ signed to protect writers against the demand to take a definite ideolo­ gical position. Zamyatin’s merit lies not in his philosophy, but entirely in his art. In one way, this essay is consistent with Zamyatin’s thought: it is heretical and disruptive of previous thinking. But to my mind it is too literal. The flight beyond the Green Wall is not the goal: the point is to bring nature into the city. Besides, the flight is symbolic: not a return to the ape, but to the unconscious, which lives not only in the past, but also in the present, and points the way to the future. Zamyatin did not reject the city, but its pernicious aspects—its impersonal structures and dehumanizing routines. And he never advocated the simple country life or the ideal village commune—he ridiculed them. Finally, Zamyatin as a thinker did pick up from Hegel, as did Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Bergson et al., but was not unoriginal for all that. Although he could hardly be expected to rework Hegel as thoroughly as the great philosophers, he did make a significant innovation in the dialectic, both in his fiction and exposition: he remained dialectical. Zamyatin took Marx at his word. If we must "contemplate every accomplished form in its movement, that is, as something transitory” (Marx), then a final solution to the problems of social structure, government, justice and happiness cannot be achieved. There will be no final synthesis in which all existence achieves self-consciousness

Introduction

19

and God contemplates Himself (Hegel), nor will a dictatorship of the proletariat eliminate class distinctions, cause the state to wither and Beget a final communist society (Marx).. Zamyatin had the courage after the revolution to remain a revolutionary, to deny utopian solutions,’ to regard established truths as transitory. All truths will pass: “Truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.” It is this simple, but fun­ damental innovation in dialectical thinking which immunized some wri­ ters against dogmatism in the twenties and which excites the minds of readers today. Also, paradoxically, it locates a single sure outlook in a whirlwind of change, just like the maxim of Heraclitus—“All flows,” which has yet to be refuted.

Ideology

Whatever one's interest in We, it is impossible to ignore its ideology. Zamyatin was arrested in 1905 for his involvement in the revolutionary movement. He was a Bolshevik at the time. After seven months' solitary confinement in a prison in Petersburg, he was exiled to his native town of Lebedyan, where the stillness began to weigh on him. Returned to Petersburg, he completed courses in the Polytechnic Insti­ tute and travelled through Russia building ships. At the same time he began to write stories, and by 1911 felt he had found himself. Two years later he and his publishers were arrested and tried in court for his story A God-Forsaken Hole (Na kulichkakh), a satire of garrison life in the sticks. In March 1916 he went to England to supervise the building of Russian ice-breakers. While bombs were falling from German zeppelins, Zamyatin was busy writing his satire of English conformity, The Islanders. News of the February Revolution in Russia changed all his plans, and he hastened to return home, finding passage on a rickety ship only by September 1917. Present for the October Revolution, Zamyatin elected to stay and work with the new government, simul­ taneously teaching courses in shipbuilding and prose writing. As an “expert,” he was active in numerous state-sponsored cultural enterprises, but was now a “Fellow-Traveller”—no longer a Bolshevik. In 1922, Zamyatin was arrested and placed in solitary confinement, again in the same prison and cell block as in 1905. Then he was exiled. Details about the incident are skimpy, but it seems highly likely that We played its part. Zamyatin returned to Petrograd-Leningrad and con­ tinued to work there until compelled to address his letter to Stalin. From this sketch of his career, it is clear that he took a critical view of whatev-

20

Introduction

er society he happened to be in. Pre-revolutionary Russia, wartime England, post-revolutionary Russia—each began to bore him. Zamyatin wrote his credo in the essay of 1918, “Are They Scythians?”: The lot of the true Scythian is the thorns of the vanquished. His faith is heresy. His destiny is the destiny of Ahasuerus. His work is not for the near, but for the distant future. And this work has at all times, under the laws of all the monarchies and republics, including the Soviet republic, been rewarded only with a lodging at gov­ ernment expense—prison. (Translated by Mirra Ginsburg in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, University of Chicago, 1970, p. 23.)

Ever alert to the first signs of monolithic thought, Zamyatin reacted quickly to the new mores and institutions of the first Marxist state in history. By reducing them to their essence and extending them ad absurdem, he not only subjected them to ridicule, but in a sense pre­ dicted the future. We accurately presages Stalin’s cult of personality (“the Benefactor”), Pravda’s monopoly on truth (“the State Gazette”), the travesty of one-party voting (“the Day of Unanimity”), the control of literature (“the State Union of Poets and Writers”) and the Iron Curtain (or Berlin Wall), beyond which one is not allowed to go ("the Green Wall”). Some of Zamyatin’s predictions did not come to pass in the Soviet Union, such as the “Sexual Hours”—the twenties were rife with free-love theories, but Stalin enforced state marriage and puritanical relations, at least officially. Readers can gauge how well “pediculture” has been realized by Soviet child-care centers and schools. Or how well “fantasiectomy” has been realized in Soviet psychoprisons, euphemized as “Special Psychiatric Hospitals.” Probably it is not these shots, damaging as they are, which prevent the publication of We in the USSR. Soviet critics could dismiss them as peculiarities of the time, or find parallels in American history—for example, the spread of cults from the Oneida Community to Jonestown. Indeed, some of Zamyatin’s predictions more accurately hit our society: for the State Music Plant and music-making machines, we have the inescapable Muzak or soft rock in store, elevator and telephone­ on-hold; and for Sexual Hours, we have computerized dating and per­ sonal listings in porno sheets. As for bugging devices, it’s a toss-up who’s ahead. So rather it must be the ideological argument, the denial of a final revolution and a final truth, which is intolerable to the Soviet power. Were We published in the USSR, it would hardly cause a mass revolution, but it might start a little revolution in the mind of each reader. Thus it acts as a litmus test. So long as it is banned, all talk of freedom

Introduction

21

of speech and thought in the USSR must be regarded as sham. If ever it is allowed, we might pay attention to such talk—and expect the publica­ tion of Trotsky, Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, all non-Marxist philosophers, all novelists, all poets.

Little Details Zamyatin’s name may be transliterated in three ways: Evgeny Zamyatin, Evgenii Zamiatin, Evgenij Zamjatin. This book uses the first in the text of the essays, but may use the second in footnotes when referring to Russian-language publications. The third may also appear in footnotes when it is in the original title of a publication. The first name Yevgeny or Eugene may also appear in such instances. The first entry of D-503 (fourth sentence of the novel) declares that the One State was founded a thousand years previous. In the third entry (third sentence), D-503 addresses the reader who may have only reached the stage of civilization 900 years previous. Thus some critics remark that the novel is set in the 29th century, others—in the 30th century. There are also articles which refer to other centuries, not in­ cluded here. It seemed opportune on this occasion to collect a number of Zamyatin materials which have come to light in recent years, even though they may not always touch on the novel. As with the collected articles, it would be a shame for them to remain scattered.

G. K.

THE SOVIET VIEW

EVGENY ZAMYATIN1 Alexander Voronsky

The example of Zamyatin excellently confirms the truth that talent and intellect, however much a writer might be endowed with them, are insufficient if he has lost contact with his epoch, if his inner sensitivity has betrayed him, and in the midst of contemporaneity the artist or thinker feels as though he were a passenger on a ship, or a tourist, looking around with animosity and impatience. With the appearance of A Tale of the Provinces (Uezdnoe) in 1913 Zamyatin immediately took a place among the prominent masters of the word. A Tale of the Provinces portrays our pre-revolutionary tsarist provinces with their sleepy, comfortable, fertile, serious, thrifty, devout inhabitants. A Tale of the Provinces is well known to the reader both personally and through the peerless fictional models of the classics, beginning with Gogol and ending with Gorky. The fragrant geranium, the ficuses, the vicious watchdogs, the deadly nightshade, the shamelessness, the stinking coziness, and the crude psychology have been encountered time and again. Nevertheless, Zamyatin’s A Tale of the Provinces is read with the most vivid attention and interest. Zamyatin had already at that time become established as an exception­ al enthusiast for and master of the word. His language is fresh, original, and exact. It is partly folk skaz, stylized and modernized to be sure, and partly the simple colloquial provincial speech of the suburbs, the out­ lying districts, and the Rasteryaeva streets.2 In this fusion Zamyatin created something his own, something individual. The spontaneity and the epic quality of the narration are complicated by the ironic and satiric­ al mood of the author. His skaz is not without reflection, and only appears to come straightforward from the author: actually everything here is written with a “trap,” and contains a hidden mockery, smirk, and spite. This is why the epic quality of the skaz slips out and the work lives and emerges into the realm of the contemporary and the topical. The provinciality of the language is ennobled and well thought out. Above all it serves vividness, freshness, and picturesqueness, and enriches the

25

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Alexander Voronsky

language with words which have not become familiar or trite. It is as though there were before you just-minted coins, and not worn, dull, and long-circulated ones. Great austerity and economy. Nothing is said rashly; everything is joined together; there are no gaps. From the point of view of form the tale is like a monolith. Zamyatin had not yet lost control of his enthusiasm for words, as he was to do in some of his later works. There is no overloading, superfluous affectation, wordplay, liter­ ary foppery, or sleight-of-hand. He reads easily and effortlessly, and this does not at all hinder one’s becoming absorbed in the contents. This is already a manifestation of the great ability of the artist to instill an image in the memory with one stroke, with one touch of the brush. Zamyatin did not give us any new characters, but something old and familiar is rendered in a new and original light. The peaceful exist­ ence of A Tale of the Provinces is embodied in the ripe and juicy figure of Anfim Baryba. Before the eyes of the readers Anfim grows up from a boy into a provincial village policeman. The road is long, difficult, and rich in misadventures. Anfim is quadrangular. “Not for nothing did the provincial lads call him a flat-iron. Heavy, iron jaws, a very wide quad­ rangular mouth, and a narrow forehead: just like a flat-iron, with its point turned up. And Baryba is all in all some sort of broad, unwieldly, lumber­ ing creature, composed of rigid right angles.” The strong body of a beast, the soul of a beast, and all concentrated on one thing: gorging himself—for Anfim’s jaws easily crush stones into sand. They throw him out of school; Baryba doesn’t go home, but settles in a cowshed, goes hungry, steals, and winds up on this occasion in the hands of the 250-pound merchant’s wife, Chebotarikha. She, however, feels pity for Baryba after seeing his beastlike body, and Baryba—not the Baryba from the cowshed, but Chebotarikha’s right hand—has “boots like a bottle, and a watch made of silvei,” and esteem from all—above all from Chebotarikha herself, devout and insatiable at night. Happiness is not long-lived, however. Chebotarikha drives Baryba out because of the maid-servant Polka. Again the hungry life. But Baryba is a “tough cookie.” The monk Evsei turns up. Baryba robs him, then is paid by the provincial lawyer Morgunov to give false evidence in court. The tail-end of the revolution of 1905 rolls into the god-forsaken little town. There is expropriation, carried out by youths who manage to hide, with the ex­ ception of one. And to the greater misfortune of the district police officer, the colonel who arrives to judge him is suffering from stomach trouble, and there is no way the police officer can please him—and furthermore he cannot find the malefactors. The same Baryba rescues him from misfortune. For 150 rubles he proves that the tailor Timokha—the true bosom friend of Baryba—is among the malefactors.

Evgeny Zamyatin

27

Baryba is sorry for his friend, but he endures and attains a provincial nirvana: they give him silver buttons and gold braid. The policeman salutes him, and they hang Timokha. “It’s great to be alive!” Anfim is a symbol of what is provincial: bestial, chewy, fat-snouted, greasy, gluttonous. In the provinces God is something edible. There people devote themselves to eating to the point of satiety, so that the jaws grind away luxuriously, so that they can sleep to the point of stupor, and can procreate children with sweaty and sticky bodies. Bary­ ba himself is fortuitous: he could be born or not. But A Tale of the Provinces pushes him out and moves him into the limelight. He is awkward, obtuse, almost an idiot, cunning as a beast. But Chebotarikha, the monk Evsei, the attorney Morgunov, the district police officer, the public prosecutor, and the colonel need him; therefore he attains the “heights” without effort and struggle. The others are also bestial. Anfim takes them into himself; he is made from them; he is their clot. This edible quality is accentuated and rendered by the author with exceptional force. A Tale of the Provinces is only in part a story of everyday life. It is more a satire—and not simply a satire, but a political satire, brightly painted and bold for the year 1913. In distinction from a number of authors who wrote about provincial matters, Zamyatin linked Russian Okurovism3 with the entire Tsarist mode of life and its political system, and herein lies his unquestionable merit. But, strange to say, Zamyatin’s talent here achieves only half its goal. Something great, something sincere, something all-illuminating, which the reader finds in Gogol, in the satires of Shchedrin, in Uspensky, in Gorky, and even in Chekhov, is missing. It is as if the tale, in spite of its purity of style and form, falls to pieces before the reader. It is masterfully narrated and delightfully done, but done just so it doesn’t touch the reader deeply or penetrate inside, even though Baryba, Chebotarikha, Morgunov, Evsei, Timokha, and the district police officer stand before our eyes. Zamyatin approached provincial matters from another side in a different tale—“Alatyr.” Gogol already noted the Manilovism of our provinces. People live so-so, it would seem; it is not a heavenly life, but man is so inclined that he must without fail dream about something which does not exist and, perhaps, never will exist. Manilov has every­ thing and still fantasizes. But if not everything is well with the Manilovs, and they are pressured, no matter by what, they fantasize all the more. Zamyatin tells about these peculiar dreamers in “Alatyr.” Alatyr is a town.

28

Alexander Voronsky Among those inhabitants—needless to say it was inherited from mushrooms—there came to exist a downright unrestrainable fecundity. They bap­ tized children wholesale, by the dozens. There remained only one street passing through: a decree came out forbidding travel along the others, in order that the babies crawling in abundance through the grass would not be crushed.

However, the paradise at one time passed away. The Turkish war was on, many people were killed, and the maidens of Alatyr remained without eligible young men. From here the dreams of Alatyr became reality. Glafira, the daughter of the district police officer, moans for eligible young men and awaits a love letter from a handsome stranger. The district police officer, after unsuccessful attempts to marry off Glafira, settles himself still more firmly in his study and invents things. His latest discoveries are the secret of baking loaves of bread not with yeast, but with pigeon dung, and how to prepare waterproof cloth from ordinary unbleached linen. The archpriest Father Peter converses with devils when drunk and when sober; his daughter Varvara also becomes possessed in the absence of eligible young men. Rodivon Rodivonych, the inspector, delights in reading Almanach de Gotha. And then there is Kostya Edytkin, who works at the post office. He has a secret notebook in which is written “The Works of Kons. Edytkin, that is, mine.” And verses: “In my breast there lies a dream, but dear Glafira disdains me.” At night he writes with excitement and great love. In a word, each one has his dreams. Further, a prince arrives in the capacity of postmaster. True, he has a nose with a hump and has no chin—he is an oriental prince, but a prince nevertheless. And here is what happens: Glafira, Varvara, and the maidens all go out of their minds. And the price also has a most noble dream: all should speak one great language, Esperanto, and then the brotherhood of peoples would be realized. The district police officer, the inspector, Glafira, Varvara, the maidens,and others all study with the prince. The dreams end lamentably. Glafira and Varvara arrange to fight it out; Kostya endures a most cruel failure with the composition “The Internal Feminine Dogma of Godliness,” and failure in love also; the prince suffers failure with his Esperanto; the district police officer suffers failure with his experiments; and so forth. Here also appear the provincial, the bestial, and the edible, but in addition to this there are phantasms, mirages, and dreams. The phan­ tasms are pitiful and distorted, and they lead into a blind alley, but all the same they are phantasms. And so the meager and tedious life of Alatyr flows on between zoology and absurd fantasizing. The dreaming of the inhabitants of Alatyr, however, is distinguished from Manilovism by means of its dramatism; regardless of its absurdity, it eats into and

Evgeny Zamyatin

29

mangles life, flying asunder as dust at the first contact with life. And perhaps that is why the inhabitants of thousands of Alatyrs do not believe in the feasibility of the great impulses of the human spirit: after all, they have before their eyes only these nonsensical, unnecessary dreams. In “Alatyr” the basic features of Zamyatin’s artistic talent are those which appear in A Tale of the Provinces. The tale is somewhat less vivid, but there is in it the same enthusiasm for the word, the same craftsmanship, the same oblique observation, the same smirk and iro­ nical smile, the same anecdotal quality (more, perhaps, in "Alatyr” than A Tale of the Provinces), the same sharpness, abruptness, and promin­ ence of device, the same careful selection of words and phrases, a great force of picturesqueness, unexpectedness of similies, the isola­ tion of one or two traits, and restraint. Bestiality is also treated in the story "The Womb” (Chrevo). Anifimya, a robust peasant woman, young, in the prime of life, kills her husband because of the need to have a child, and pickles his body. But here the force of the womb is presented in a different light. There is a great deal of lyricism in the story, and the bestial element in Anifimya is different from that seen in Baryba. One sympathizes with it. Bestiality splits in two: it is no longer in the image of Baryba, but in the image of Anifimya, touchingly thirsting for fertilization. The tale “At the World’s End” (Na kulichkakh) closely corresponds to A Tale of the Provinces and “Alatyr” in content and theme. Written at the beginning of the Russo-German War, it was confiscated by the Tsarist government and the author, as a Bolshevik, was imprisoned for antimilitaristic propaganda. (The tale appeared in print in issue number one of The Circle, the almanac of the writers’ artel.) A military unit is dispatched to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, to a sentry post forgotten by all and not needed by anyone. The oppressed, muddle-headed Russian peasants, very sharp-witted in economic and agricultural matters, but utterly obtuse with regard to service, adapt according to their needs as "gentlemen officers.” Their needs are highly peculiar: they teach one to speak French, another is transformed into the wet nurse and nanny of nine children, a third exists in the kitchen for the purpose of absorbing slaps in the face from generals—and all are reduced to the point where they lose their human traits, and it is not for nothing that the soldier Arzhanoy kills a Chinaman while out walking—in such a situation this is very natural. The author’s attention, however, is concentrated not on the Arzhanoys, but on a small group of officers. Kuprin’s The Duel (Poedinok) pales before the picture of moral decay and degradation depicted by Zamyatin: a cesspool in an

30

Alexander Voronsky

out-of-the-way place. There is the General—an exceptional glutton, a coward, a philanderer, a voluptuary, and a rotter; the narrow-minded pedant Shmit—fidgety, in his own way just, being changed into a miser­ able sadist; and Captain Nechesa, rearing nine children who in reality are not his; the weak-willed mellow Russian intellectual in an officer’s coat, Andrei Ivanovich; the lanky, absurd Tikhmen, vainly trying to solve the riddle of whether “Petyashka,” born to Nechesa’s wife, is his child or not; the quiet, half-crazy General’s wife; and the regimental lady, Nechesa’s wife—all chubby, and whose children are a living chronology. As in both A Tale of the Provinces and “Alatyr” it is deadly wearisome, sleepy, and absurd at the world’s end. But not so much wearisome as terrifying. In the tale this terrifying quality is particularly emphasized by the author, and the principal part of attention is concen­ trated on it—in distinction from A Tale of the Provinces and “Alatyr.” A terrifying quality exists in these works too, but there is more about bestiality and about a provincial fantasizing in them; here it is the basic thing. Beneath the cover of a tedious, petty life Zamyatin saw this terrifying quality and pointed out to his readers not that imperceptible, grey, slowly-enveloping side of it, which Chekhov wrote about in his time, but the genuinely bloody, hideously brutal, tragic side of it. True, at the world’s end, at the back of the beyond, they often fail to notice this side of it, but that is because it has entered into their everyday life. Tikhmen and the rectangular Shmit end their lives by suicide, Andrei Ivanovich becomes “ours," the soldiers are reduced to a bestial state, and the general basely, lispingly, and slobberingly rapes the tender and frail Marusia. “At the World’s End,” like A Tale of the Provinces, is a political and artistic satire. It makes much of what happened after 1914 understandable. In its own way it is a perhaps justified prophecy, but it also brings out, more so than the works written earlier, still another feature of Zamyatin’s artistic gift. The tale is cast in a genuine, lofty, and touching lyricism. Zamyatin’s lyricism has something all its own. It is womanly. In its details and subtleness it is always a kind of autumnal spider’s web—a Virgin’s thread. Here are Marusia’s words: “About one, very last little second of life—delicate as a spider web. The very last—it will break now, and everything will be silent...” Or, a slight hint “about the bird dozing on the snowy tree, the blue wind.” This is the way it is everywhere in Zamyatin’s later work. One can speak of this lyricism in the author’s words: not meaningful, not anything special, but it is re­ tained in the memory. Perhaps it is because of this that Zamyatin’s female types succeed so well, so intimately, and so tenderly: they all have a special something, they are not like one another—and in the best, the favorite of them there throbs that small, sunny, dear, memor-

Evgeny Zamyatin

31

able something which is scarcely perceptible to the ear, but which is sensed by the entire being. And still, when you read “At the World’s End,” every now and then old acquaintances are called to mind: Kuprin’s The Duel, Sergeev-Tsensky’s “Lieutenant Babaev” and "Kukushka,” Gogol’s Petukh, and so forth. Let us note, however, that in all these things, in A Tale of the Provinces and in “At the World’s End,” the struggle against stagnation, obtuseness, and staleness reflects only a personal attitude. Timokha, Marusia, and Andrei Ivanovich are isolated rebels, not united with any collective or group. This is not accidental—but greater detail about that below.

II After a two-year stay in England during the war years, Zamyatin brought back “The Islanders" (Ostrovitiane) and “A Fisher of Men" (Lovets chelovekov). From A Tale of the Provinces to London and Jesmond. From dirt, pigs, and mire to stones, concrete, iron, steel, zeppelins, and underground roads. From Chebotarikha, Baryba, and district police officers to the sedate English life, mechanized and sche­ duled in detail. For Vicar Dooley, author of a book called The Testament of Compulsory Salvation, everything is done according to hours: ... a schedule for the hours of food intake; a schedule for the days of repentance (twice a week); a schedule for the enjoying of fresh air; a schedule for the pursuit of charity; and, finally, among a number of others—one schedule, out of modesty untitled and especially concerning Mrs. Dooley, on which the Saturdays of every third week were marked.

Life is a machine, a mechanism, and everything is thoroughly regulated; all the people are identical, with identical walking sticks, top hats, and dentures. In “The Islanders" and “A Fisher of Men” there is satire on English bourgeois life—biting, sharp, effective, finished down to the details and to the point of scrupulousness. But the more carefully one reads both the long tale and the short story, the more strongly one gets the im­ pression that neither the heart nor the bosom of life has been captured, but rather, that its surface has been captured. In essence the artist has produced a filigree work on slight material. Here are the trifles of British life; it is true that these trifles drive one to distraction, but this does not

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Alexander Voronsky

change matters. A life mechanized according to a timetable; the gleam­ ing pince-nez of Mrs. Dooley; the gentlemen with dentures; Campbell's mother, Lady Campbell—a “frame in an old umbrella, broken by the wind”—with her sedateness and her lips wriggling like worms; the ser­ mons about compulsory salvation; visits to cathedrals; the Pharisaism; the espionage; the English crowd demanding execution; and the execution—excellent, well done, clever, talented—but very similar to the tales (told by the Andrei Ivanoviches who have been abroad) of the Philistine mores of virtuous Swiss landladies, who are horrified at the sight of men’s galoshes, forgotten overnight by the room of a female Russian emigree. They are engaging and interesting tales, and it could happen that some Andrei Ivanovich or other winds up in prison because of these galoshes; there he may do some other unseemly thing, for which he will be hanged or executed in the electric chair. To present similar cases in the form of conclusive artistic generalizations is not enough in our days, after the war and during the mightiest of social cataclysms. In England, as everywhere, there is not one, but rather, there are two nations, two peoples, two races; and he who does not understand this, and he who, in our time, through the eyes of one nation, cannot look at the other nation even for a minute and weigh and evaluate it, will never feel the true depths of social life, its most profound contradictions, and its “essence.” And Zamyatin looks through the eyes of the attorney O’Kelly, the coquette Didi, and Campbell; there is no mention of these other eyes without which one can no longer make a step. O’Kelly and Didi are the “underminers of the foundations” of loyal English life. The bases are “shaken” in the living room of the venerable vicar, at dinner at Lady Campbell’s (O’Kelly appears for dinner in a morning coat, prefers whiskey to liqueur, and embarks on a conversa­ tion about Oscar Wilde), in Didi’s room, in the circus, and elsewhere. It is precisely in this way that a Russian “shakes” principles in the antechamber of a Zurich landlady by absent-mindedly leaving his galoshes. It seems that other eyes of the other nation in England would have noticed, from the shipyards and the coal mines, something a bit more serious and more substantial, and would have arrived at conclu­ sions in a more substantial manner. It is possible to object that the author uses a special artistic device here: an immensity of trifles, with a bloody denouement, seemingly underscores the unbearable asphyxia of the situation in which the abor­ igines of London and Jesmond find themselves. However, this is more than an artistic device here; it is something more profound and intimate, connected by strong and indissoluble roots with Zamyatin’s artistic credo. According to the author’s ideology there are two forces in the

Evgeny Zamyatin

33

world—one striving for peace, the other eternally rebelling and dynamic. In his latest unprinted and fantastic novel We, one of the heroines says: “There are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One leads to blessed peace, to happy equilibrium; the other leads to the destruction of equilibrium, to agonizingly perpetual motion.” A Tale of the Provinces, “Alatyr,” and “At the World’s End” represent equilibrium and entropy. But here too another, opposite, force is at work, albeit in distorted form. It is seen in Timoshka, in the absurd phantasms of Kostya and the other inhabitants of Alatyr, and in Marusia. In the short story “The Good-for-Nothing” (Neputevyi), the eternal student is a thoughtless and negligent sot who squanders his energies, and whose merry and impudent life ends on the barricades. In the short story “The Diehards” (Kriazhi), this force makes Ivan and Maria go against one another for a long time. They are obstinate, and such persons have to have this tight, resilient, willful, good-for-nothing quality. All the works published by Zamyatin (we are convinced still more strongly of this below) symbolize the struggle between these two elements. And from this point of view Zamyatin is unconditionally a symbolist who has set himself the goal of dressing the laws of physics and chemistry in the analytical means. Therefore his style manifests living folk skaz, mod­ ernized colloquial speech, and squareness of images—quadrangular, square, straight, flat-iron-like, and so forth. The two forces engage in an endless struggle, but one—the force of inertia, tradition, peace, equilibrium—weighs down the other, destructive, force with heavy layers, like the earth’s crust, easing and forging a molten fiery element. Peace and equilibrium are found in the sleepy Tale of the Provinces, in the life of the Craggses and that of the Dooley couple. Only in certain rare instants are vents opened and does the crust break; and then the stormy underground force of destruction gushes forth like lava from a volcano. But usually the cold, petrified, numb forces reign. Only such rare moments are valuable and significant. Zamyatin tells mainly about them; they are the axis of his artistic creation. This force and the “instants” assume in Zamyatin the most varied images, shapes, and forms. Marusia with her meaningless conversations about the spider web and death, which are imprinted forever in the soul of Andrei Ivanovich; the capricious Didi; the fiery redhead Pelka in “The North” (Sever); the heroine number such-and-such in the novel We. They personify what is most necessary and valuable: from them emanates, and through them speaks the genuine force of life, its womb and its most holy of holies. From them come uprisings and ruptures in things of set dimensions which have always been overgrown with moss. In the short story “The Land

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Surveyor” (Zemlemer) the hero can find no way to say that he loves Lizaveta Petrovna. The “moment” arrives when out of mischief some lads have smeared the dog "Funtik” with paint. The girl begins to feel sorry for the dog, tears begin to flow, and then “the surveyor forgot about everything and began to stroke Lizaveta Petrovna’s hair.” Then the surveyor is about to have to spend a night with the girl in one room in a monastery, and had this happened they would have remained together. But the nanny arrives, and everything is over: “That’s how it had to be.” In “A Fisher of Men” such a moment occurs when the Zeppelins are over London. Crashing bombs burst into the thoroughly regulated life of the Craggses, and the usual balanced and settled way of life collapses. The “curtain” is drawn over Mrs. Lorry’s lips, and a pianist, the good-for-nothing Bailey, kisses her with lips “as tender as a colt’s,” and Mrs. Lorry responds in kind. But that is only an instant: “The cast-iron feet fell silent somewhere in the south. Everything was over.” In “The Protectress of Sinners” (Spodruchnista greshnykh), during the revolution peasants break into the Mother Superior’s quarters of a cer­ tain monastery with the intention of stealing, but at the very decisive moment the "reverend mother" in an especially touching way treats the malefactors to pies and something else, and the bloody deed is shattered. In “The Dragon," the dragonman (a Red Army man) has just told in a streetcar how he dispatched “an intellectual mug,” “without transfer, into the kingdom of heaven.” Suddenly he sees a sparrow freezing in a corner of the streetcar. The dragon, his rifle fallen to the floor, warms the sparrow with all his might, and when the sparrow flies away, the “dragon's" mouth opens in an ear-to-ear grin. The world is like a dog (“Eyes”): it has a mangy fur coat, it cannot speak, but only barks, it zealously guards its master’s property (the property is guarded for a little dish of rotten meat); it breaks away from his chain and slowly, pitifully, and full of guilt, with its tail between its legs, drags itself along to its master’s kennel. But. . . “such beautiful eyes. And in those eyes, in the depths, such sad human wisdom ..." Sometimes there are sailors of the Potemkin ("Three Days”), but more often Didi, O'Kelly, Senia, and others. The sailors of the Potemkin are entirely outside Zamyatin’s field of vision. He was born and grew up in A Tale of the Provinces, and his people are for the most part found in the images of the Arzhanoys, the Timokhas, the Neprotoshnys, the drunkard Guslyaikins, the lads who out of boredom half-drown a boy by pouring water over him, or who perform experiments with paint and a dog, or peasants who rebel against cheese (“we ate close to five pounds of that very same soap”). In Zamyatin there is no peasant who looks different as, for instance, there is in the partisan stories of Vsevo­

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lod Ivanov. Zamyatin cannot look at what is around him through the eyes of these sailors, peasants, and workers. It is interesting that in his reminiscences of the Potemkin days the author also concentrates his attention on only an instant—three days—when it seemed that every­ thing was breaking away from the shores. The moment is therefore valuable to him. No general connection is felt between these days and the revolution. The author does not need that. This is why in “The Islanders” and “A Fisher of Men” Didi, O’Kelly, and even Campbell introduce a rebellious element into the thoroughly regulated life of the Craggses and the Dooleys. The rebellion turns out not to be very dangerous, since the tops, and not the roots are taken. Poignant, but permissible. The rebellion is loyal—it is not that rebellion of which sailors, workers, and peasants are capable. After all there is only dissolution here, a narrowly individualistic protest, as a result of which the foundations will not be shaken. The writer is concerned with that: for him it is necessary to juxtapose to thoroughly regulated life moments of individual rebellion, small and insignificant and intimate, which the author nonetheless values and remembers most of all. In A Tale of the Provinces and “At the World’s End” the protests and the struggle are also personal and are carried on by persons acting alone. The writer completely fails to see, mention, or value other forms. There the struggle always ends in defeat. It cannot be otherwise when exclu­ sively individual considerations are put foremost. In our time, we repeat, this is too little and is superficial. And when an artist is inclined toward political lampoons, it is possible to anticipate that he will experience failures. Nevertheless, both “The Islanders” and "A Fisher of Men” remain masterful artistic lampoons, in spite of their limited significance. The writer’s London works, like A Tale of the Provinces, “At the World’s End,” and "Alatyr,” will remain in our literature. We must also bear in mind the fact that "The Islanders” came off the press when many fellow writers, considering themselves the preservers of the testaments of all Russian literature, perceived in the likes of Vicar Dooley and Mister Craggs the bearers of humaneness and humanity, and of other virtues which are not in keeping with those insidious Bolsheviks. Zamyatin did not stick to his noble, truly and only “mutinous” position later. But about that below. The artistic merits of “The Islanders” and “A Fisher of Men” are indubitable. The capability of rendering image and character with one device is consolidated in hardened form. It is as if Vicar Dooley and Mister Craggs were forged. Zamyatin is an artist-experimenter, but a special experimenter. With him the experiment is taken to extremes, to

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the limit. It is, so to speak, an experiment in the pure form. In his style Zamyatin departed from modernized folk skaz: it is necessary to do that in a story about London. For the first time the artist renders that clipped and condensed style with dashes, omissions, hints, and things left unsaid, that intricate work on the word and that admiration for it, that semi-imaginism—all of which have later been strongly reflected in the work of the majority of the Serapions. It is painstaking work to the point of small details, so laborious that one must maintain a constant effort and must read every line intently. This is wearisome; at times it even leads to affectation and satiety, as though the author were playing with his handicraft.

Ill

In the short story “The Good-for-Nothing” the following conversa­ tion takes place between a conspirator, the underground figure Isav, and Senia the good-for-nothing: Isav was saying: “And how is it possible to believe in anything? I only assume and act. A working hypothesis, you understand?" Peter Petrovich turned to Senia: "Well, and you?" “Me-e? What, are you crazy? That I... If I had my way I wouldn’t even look at all their programs. Thank God, at long last we busted loose from those shores, but now they want to drive us back. And I say if there is an overflow, then let it be for real, like on the Volga ....”

In accordance with this, the good-for-nothing Senia is given an obvious moral preponderance: Senia heroically perishes on the barricades, and Isav philosophizes on the occasion of his senseless death, although the author does not refuse Isav his cold, even inimical respect. The attitude “I wouldn’t even look at all their programs” flows forth organically from the writer’s entire artistic outlook. As we saw earlier, Zamyatin approached the complex phenomena of social life with a physical theory about two forces in the world: entropy and energy. Moreover, it has turned out in his work that the destructive element functions at “moments,” in “incidents,” and in individual, intimate im­ pulses of the human spirit. The artist has also approached the Russian revolution with this measuring stick. The result has been what it must be on these occasions. As applied to society this theory of two forces is not so much

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untrue as it is abstract, and therefore untrue as well. There are insignifi­ cant cliches containing nothing concrete; living life flows away here, like water between the fingers. As a matter of fact a dead scheme has been applied to whatever has been found suitable: abstract rebelliousness, revolutionism, and heresy in the name of heresy. The “flood,” “agonizingly perpetual motion," “asceticism”—this is all very empty, insignificant, and abstract. This abstract rebelliousness weakened the artist to a greater extent in “The Islanders,” as well as in A Tale of the Provinces and “At the World’s End." It led to a fundamental misunder­ standing in the writer’s attitudes toward the Russian revolution. This is the way it had to happen. As soon as a “heretic" tried to descend to earth from the mountainous heights in the name of “heresy,” great discord resulted. It turned out that “their programs," those of the peasants, the workers, and the masses, also existed on the “rebellious” earth, and concrete “earthly” targets were established on earth. They were in general very little interested in intimate, personal rebellion. Instead, they prepared and set in motion the most enormous collectives: Communists, the Red Army and others. Historically and socialistically, abstract revolutionism and so-called spiritual maximal­ ism have expressed the intelligentsia’s rosy pre-revolutionary romanticism, and even before the revolution they pointed out the essential discord between the ideal and the real in the consciousness of broad circles of the intelligentsia. The liquidation of the autocracy was thought to be necessary and desirable, but on the other hand even then the intelligentsia viewed the elemental Bolshevism of the workers and peasants with fear. Thus arose the desire to see the revolution as noble, and not made by the coarse hand of the peasant and the worker, but rather by clean hands with polished nails. As soon as it was disco­ vered that this would not be the case, but that the revolution would be rough-hewn, the rebelliousness of the Russian O’Kellys and Senkas vanished most rapidly, like smoke. Spiritual maximalism and the fier­ cest heresy were suddenly left somewhere beyond the bounds of the revolution, and it was discovered that maximalism had “a soul small in appearance and by no means immortal,” that world-wide revolutionism looks very (even extremely) cultured, moderate, and neat, that it pre­ sumes to conquer the heavens and not the sinful earth, that this was said about the revolution of the spirit in some sort of special fiery transformation—and not about “that republic," or whatever it is called—and that it was said about the intimate and all-cleansing moments. And they were not to plunder country estates, or take away factories, or carry valuable cultural objects off to their huts, etc., etc. In Zamyatin we see seemingly implacable rebelliousness, fun-

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damental and indefatigable, we see people in the images of the Arzhanoys and the Guslyaikins, we see a looking to the ideal as to something irreparably torn away from the earth (the acknowledgement of revolu­ tion in the spirit, in intimate moments), alienation, cold remoteness from the genuine face of the revolution, and hostility to it. Be that as it may, after October Zamyatin wrote a number of stories and tales which afforded undoubtable satisfaction to the most violent enemies of October, and great and sincere chagrin and indignation to those who knew and valued his talent: "The Dragon,” "Mamai,” “The Cave,” “The Church of God,” “The Moors,” (Arapy), “The Protectress of Sinners,” and finally, the novel We. The most talented of these works is "The Cave," and the most serious is We. We have happened to hear the objection that it is very rash and premature to paint Zamyatin’s recent works white: not every satire is White propaganda, and not everything which is dressed in red is genuine revolution. That is so. There really does exist among us a fear of touching upon the sore spots of the Soviet mode of life. We must fight this fear in every way possible. The following often happens: people are long silent, and all of a sudden they begin to sound the alarm (let’s say over a bribe, for example). And there are quite a few weak-willed indi­ viduals to be found, too. If Zamyatin had written his caustic works while remaining on the soil of the revolution, it would only be possible to hail him. Unfortunately, things are not that way at all. Zamyatin has approached the October Revolution obliquely, coldly, and with hostility, it is alien to him not in its details, even if they are essentially important, but as a whole. In the strange, unfamiliar city of Petrograd the passengers wandered in confusion. In some ways it was like, and in some ways unlike, the Petersburg from which they had been sailing for almost a year now, and to which, God knows, they would return some day .. . Australian warriors in strange rags, their weapons on ropes behind their shoulders . . . Australians with red faces were pushing into the opening with enormous bags (“Mamai").

And again: On the streetcar platform a dragon with a rifle flashed briefly, rushing into the unknown. His cap fit down over his nose and would of course have swallowed up his head if it were not for his ears; the cap had settled on the protruding ears.... And a hole in fog: his mouth ("The Dragon").

In "The Moors” the dragons and the Australians are called redskins. Only a citizen-passenger of the republic, who on the

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republic’s ship turns green from seasickness in the strongest tossing, can write this way. Of course seasickness is a most unpleasant illness, but if a passenger transfers his condition to the sailors and to the officers, who work to the point of exhaustion during a fierce storm to bring the ship into a port, this is entirely wrong and unjust. Our passen­ ger behaves himself just as wrongly and unjustly in relation to the ships, officers and sailors. They are Australians, and they have their weapons on ropes, and their mouths are like holes—he doesn’t like any of this. The situation becomes still more complicated by the fact that the pas­ senger got on the ship unexpectedly and suddenly, and doesn't know where the ship is rushing, into which harbor it will pull, or whether it will even pull into a harbor at all. The greenishness from seasickness and other discomforts seems entirely unjustified and meaningless here. In fact, in the name of what are all these torments and discomforts suffered? Wouldn’t it be better to sit at home in the living room: “My little blue room, and a piano with a cover on it, and on the piano a wooden ashtray in the shape of a little horse.” This is from "The Cave.” The story is excellently written and conveys the conditions which existed. There were those days when rooms were transformed into icy caves, and the greedy cave-god, the stove, ruled over everything. Martyn Martynych pitifully and awkwardly steals firewood so that Masha can warm herself. And Masha has become thin and has not got out of bed. She recalls the blue room, simply and quickly takes a bottle with poison in order to die, and as if nothing special were happening, she sends Martyn Martynych out to look at the moon so that he won’t see her die. And he goes obediently. That is all. But how is the work presented, in what light? Not a word about dragon-Bolsheviks, but the entire story is pointed against them. The author directs every little detail against them with a skillful hand: they are to blame for the cave life, for the stealing, and for Masha’s death. This becomes especially clear in the context of Zamyatin’s other works. It is enough to juxtapose the description to the gentle lyricism in which the writer couched Masha’s reminiscences of the piano, the wooden horse, the open window, and so on. Once it is unknown where the ship is speeding, and it is incompre­ hensible why there are passengers on it, all the sailing and the entire struggle with the hostile elements seem wild and senseless. It’s as if Moors were fighting. Now the blacks beat the redskins bloody and roast them, then the redskins roast the blacks, and in addition they are indig­ nant at the blacks: how dare the blacks maim us? (“The Moors”). Here one discovers quite clearly that the author is standing off to the side, and that he is a cold and hostile observer. Only one who did not take an active part in the events and the struggle can write like this. The strug-

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gle was such that it was not only impossible, but was frankly criminal, to approach it with the measuring sticks of the old intelligentsia. Only in the thick of this struggle, in its bloody and fiery font, could it be realized what is allowed and what is not. Can one accept and justify the murder of a bound man? Can one resort to espionage? The answers to these questions are made known to those who struggle, hate, love, and live ardently in the fire of the elements, and not to those who sail and travel. Is this allowed? It is allowed and must be if the enemy himself does not disdain it, if he has reached a state of animal frenzy, if he resorts to the very worst tactics, if he has been sold and plays the role of hireling and spy for the likes of Vicar Dooley and Mr. Craggs. These and other questions are not decided abstractly in the intelligentsia’s crowded nooks, but on the field of battle when a real enemy must be dealt with, when it is known what activities the enemy himself is undertaking and what he is practicing. Any other statement of the question is moral astrology, helpless philosophizing, and only plays into the enemy's hands. "A Fairytale” (Skazka) and “The Church of God” are permeated by such a spirit. The church of God turns out to be tainted—and how!—and all as a result of Ivan’s having built it with the money of a merchant whose throat he cut and whom he robbed. The moral is that it is impossible to build a good deed on corpses. And, incidentally, another conclusion is that one must not rob a merchant—it is a bad and dishonorable business. And third, let the merchant live (that is, rob). The author hardly agrees with the last conclusion, but only on the strength of his own inconsistency. In practice it works out this way: let the merchant rob, since the social struggle of the classes has its own logic. The last conclusion is a result of the fact that the fairytale suffers (besides other things) from one inaccuracy: the merchant is repre­ sented as the person who suffers. He is in fact a first-rate swindler, and before Ivan robbed him he had out and out swindled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of those same Ivans who later robbed him. The situation turns out to be entirely different. Before our eyes spiritual maximalism, heresy in the name of heresy, and rebelliousness based on principle are changed little by little into some sort of dull, sweetened, ideological wash which they preached to the Ivans from the pulpit, with the encouragement of the Chebotarikhas and their sons. In the story "The Protectress of Sinners” (“such words, Mother”), as was already mentioned earlier, peasants, with the permission of their council, have already managed to rob the Mother Superior of the monastery. The deed is shattered because the Mother Superior turns out to be very kind. It is her nameday and she has already treated some peasants very well.

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Sikidin stood up and lowered his forehead, like a butting ox. With his hands he supported himself against the table; his right hand was wrapped in a rag. "My dear fellow, what’s wrong with your hand? Let me wrap it in a clean bandage, or else it will start to hurt...” Sikidin held up his hand. He glanced at the Mother Superior and at his right hand—and hesitated ...

Very touching. Truly reading that is good for the soul; it is fit for an ecclesiastic reader. At least, if the Eparchial News existed now, the story could be a true decoration in the unofficial part. It is myrrh-giving. As for the style, it is no match for the Boris-and-Gleb and Alatyrian Edytkins who at once time penned things for the News occasionally. Reading such things as these one involuntarily thinks that if the old Tsarist government should rise from the tomb even for a minute it would be tenderly moved. See what kind of rebels have come to exist: not only are they not prohibiting them or putting them into prison, as they did earlier for the tale “At the World’s End,” but rather they are producing them for public consumption without number and without consideration for money. And here these dragons, Australians, and redskins, or whatever—in a word, Bolsheviks—are talking about some sort of class struggle determined by some law or other, but the entire matter consists of seating the Sikidins at the same table with the Mother Superiors, and let’s hope that these Mother Superiors will smile just at the right time and in a special way, will slip them a pasty, and will know how to bandage a hand. What sort of struggle is going on is really here—in unintentional, but particular, gestures, words, in a look, in that which is intangible and insignificant but which (and this is most valuable of all) is remembered. Only you cannot convince these redskins. They are stubborn. They do not believe "in circumstances contrary to our expectations” and are not susceptible to the exceptional and extremely rare moments. It is necessary to say a few more words about these moments and instants. It is all very well when Marusia tells Andrei Ivanovich about the spider web and death, or the surveyor helps “Funtik.” This is appropriate, lyrical, and artistically truthful, because here the personal and the intimate need be considered, and that is all. But when an artist tries to solve the most complex social problems by means of a “spider web,” by momentary insights, and so on, and to say his word in the social struggle, then trifles result—sheer saccharin, sticky syrup, politic­ al Manilovism—simply because one cannot do anything here with a “spider web," and because good-natured gestures and the impulses of nuns and other heroes and heroines do not in the least determine the course and outcome of the struggle. Zamyatin thinks otherwise.

42

Alexander Voronsky In an article about H. G. Wells, Zamyatin writes: For Wells socialism is undoubtedly the way to cure the cancer which has eaten into the organism of the old world. But medicine knows two paths for the struggle with this illness. One path is the surgeon's knife, which will perhaps either cure the patient quickly or kill him. The other path, a slower one, is treatment by radium and x-rays. Wells prefers this bloodless path.. . .

All this is extremely unsuccessful, but it is characteristic of Zamyatin. Marx said that the new society is born from the bosom of the old, like a butterfly emerging from a pupa (from a caterpillar, strictly speaking). This is a thousand times more nearly correct than a writer’s judgment about some sort of organism which it is necessary to cure, even if fundamentally. What we are talking about at these moments is the application of forceps and other obstetrical duties rather than about the curing of an organism. There is no use in curing it and no reason to cure it—it is a matter of the pupa and the butterfly. Whether it is neces­ sary to apply forceps or not depends on circumstances, and not at all on the good will of the obstetrician. But Zamyatin writes that he prefers to cure the organism bloodlessly. Childish trifles. But all of Zamyatin’s socialism is found in this. He also “prefers” the bloodless path of influ­ ence upon man. All one need do is open the windows of people’s souls, and then Sikidin will lower his beast's paw, and the Mother Superior will remain—is that the way it is? And so spiritual vagabondage, heresy, and maximalism have been turned into ordinary petit-bourgeois arguments before our very eyes—we are all socialists, but we prefer the bloodless path, and so forth. Zamyatin's tale “The North" reveals one more feature which is of no small importance in his contemporary work. Somewhere, also among the devils at the world's end, where “a thousand versts across the blue ice, the frozen sun shines on the bottom” (excellently told) there live the proprietor and shopkeeper Kartoma, Kartoma’s fisherman and worker Morei, and the beautiful red-haired Pelka. Kartoma feels his way about the earth, gives short weights, buys “the good wives” for putrid stuff, fills his pockets, and goes on drunks. Morei looks at the sky. He has done that since childhood, since that day when he was drown­ ing in the river. They gave him artificial respiration then, "only he be­ came somehow strange and withdrawn, and at the same time he would and would not look at you; he would look past, and who knows what he saw?” It happens that Morei falls in love with Pelka, and she with him, and they get on well until a lantern takes Pelka's place. Kartoma men­

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tions the lantern and lies about it. In Petersburg there supposedly shines an enormous lantern, and all around it is as light as if it were day. “Morei had a brainstorm. He would build a lantern like the one in Petersburg. Light it over the village, and there would be no night. They would begin a new life.” Morei and Pelka go hungry, but Morei has no time to worry about that: he is making the lantern. Kartoma takes Pelka at this time, and nothing comes of the project. The lantern does not illuminate the thousand versts of frozen darkness. But Pelka cannot forget Morei. The story ends fatally for both. Pelka fixes it so that a bear crushes them while they are hunting. “A familiar motif, elaborated earlier in the tale “Alatyr.” And if "The North” is juxtaposed to “Alatyr," it becomes obvious from where the author’s gaze upon the ideal and reality is evoked. It is from A Tale of the Provinces. While it is true and correct in a conventional and limited sense and for a certain situation, the author’s conception becomes incorrect as artistic generalization. But nowhere has the artist attemp­ ted to provide a solution to the problem of the relationship between the ideal and reality; it is therefore necessary to conclude that for him there is no other solution. The ideal is always divorced from life and always stifles it. Such an approach in our days leads directly to worn-out, narrow Philistine attitudes (let us recall Andrei Bely with his recent sermon: down with great principles—I want to live a frog’s life; I want to be a Philistine). Finally, something about Zamyatin’s latest work, the novel We, which has not yet been published. In one of his speeches Comrade Lenin observed: “Socialism is no longer a problem of the remote future, or of some abstract picture, or of some ikon.” The principal traits of our epoch are found in this statement. Socialism has ceased to be an ideal in the sense that it was earlier—say about twenty or thirty years ago. It is not a star calling to us as it shines in the distant and pure skies. It has become a problem of tactics, practice, and embodiment in life. And this forces some to look somewhere higher with joy and trembling, to try to raise the next curtain, and to dream boldly of further conquests—and it fills others with a great and genuine fear, a fear before that socialism which, so to speak, is already becoming current, for the historical sentence is being carried out. Zamyatin’s novel is interesting in precisely this respect: it is wholly saturated with a genuine fear of socialism which, from an ideal, was becoming a practical, everyday problem. It is a fantastic novel about the future. But it is not a utopia. It is an artistic lampoon about the present and an attempt at a future prognosis as well. In this future

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everything on earth is thoroughly regulated and the great “Integral” is being built in order to conquer the entire universe and grant it mathema­ tically exact happiness. Cultured human society is separated from the rest of the world by an indestructible wall, and since the time of the great 200-year war (a thousand years have passed since then) no one has looked beyond that wall, and no one knows what is there. Every­ thing is glassed in; everything is in plain sight and is registered. Glass sky, glass houses; there is no "I”—it is "We.” All get up and work at the same time; they eat petroleum food on command; at certain hours they make love according to little pink coupons. And over everything watch the Single State and the Benefactor of Mankind, wisely caring for mankind’s precisely mathematical happiness. Nevertheless not every­ thing is thoroughly regulated. A person does have hairy hands and a "soul,” as well as the foolish attitude that “I want to live according to my own will.” Not all, but nevertheless those who are like this are not alone. And here a thought crops up: demolish the wall, overthrow the benefac­ tors and destroy the mathematics in life. A woman, a heroine with a number, is at the head of all this. Together with her and a group of wreckers one of the builders of the "Integral” (the narration stems from his notes) gets outside the wall by means of an underground passage. There "the Earth swims, drunken, merry, light,” and people without clothing are covered with shining hair; there are birds, grass, and sun. An uprising is prepared, the wall is destroyed at once place, and an attempt is made to use the "Integral” for those who are beyond the wall. But the bureau of guardians uncovers the conspiracy. Arrests are made, the heroine executed, and an operation performed on the builder, as on all, and his fantasy center is cut out. The novel makes a painful and frightful impression. To write artistic parody and portray communism in the form of some sort of super-barracks beneath an enormous glass nightcap is nothing new. The foes of communism have long since practiced in this manner—a beaten and inglorious path. And if here are added discourses about noses (for there are these too), which must without fail be equal in length among all persons, then the character and tenor of the lampoon become clear. Everything here is untrue. Communism does not strive to subju­ gate and keep society under the heel of a single state. On the contrary, it strives for the state’s destruction and extinction. Communism does not posit as its goal the absorption of "I" by "We”—it leads, rather, to a synthesis of the individual with the social collective; nor does thoroughly integrated, mechanized, machine-like life, in the form in which the au­ thor presents it, enter into the task of communism. In communist society

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neither the city in its present form, nor the village with its "idiocy,” will exist. A combination of the city with the village is envisaged. If the artist had our wartime communism in mind, then the lampoon misses its mark here too. The practice of wartime communism can be understood only when one has taken into consideration the fact that it was necessary to fight and fight and fight with a mighty enemy, and that Soviet Russia was a fortress under siege. There is not a word about that in the novel. To oppose grass, human willfulness, and people covered with hair to communism means not to understand the essence of the question. Gleb Uspensky already observed that the herbivorous life has one essential shortcoming: it depends on mere chance. Such chance will burst into life (and it does so constantly and continuously), and all the wonderful herbivorous harmony will be wiped away. That is why man rejected this blissful primeval paradise and wanted to create his own paradise with machines, electricity, and airplanes. As for the formula “I want to live according to my own foolish will,” only to people covered with hair does it appear that they live according to their own will. Under socialism this dependence of man on the elements and the ignorance of this dependence will be replaced by knowledge and the systematic scientific liberation from it (a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom). Zamyatin has written a lampoon which is concerned not with communism, but with Bismarckian, reactionary, Richterian state socialism. Not for nothing did he rework his “Islanders” and transfer from there into the novel the main features of London and Jesmond—and not only that, but the plot as well. At times this involves even the minutiae (noses and the like). And as though sensing that not everything in the novel was in place, Zamyatin places in the mouth of his heroine No. 1-330 words which are entirely unexpected and which conflict with the general spirit of the novel. Answering the builder No. 1-330 says that the heroes of the 200-year war (read “Bolsheviks”) were right in destroying the old order. Their error lay in one matter. They later decided that they were the ultimate number, but there is no such thing; that is, from destroyers they became conservationists. If this is so, if the "heroes of the 200-year war” were right in their time, then it may be asked whether we are now experiencing that time, the time of the destruction of the old world. Anyone of sound mind and good memory will say: yes, we are experiencing it, for the simple reason that the old world still has not been destroyed and stands quite firmly in the meantime. And in that case, on what basis does the artist find it timely to fight against “communistic conservatism,” recently leaving the other, old world in shadow? Or does he suppose that we have already pre­

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vailed at last? We are of course certain that we will ultimately and irrevocably prevail, but to consider this an accomplished fact would be thoughtless. The novel, therefore, does not hit its mark. In the novel the protest and insurrection stem from the builder’s love for a woman with a certain number. The motif is Zamyatin-like and narrowly individualistic. No wonder the ending is pessimistic. The Sing­ le State has crushed those who have risen in rebellion and, moreover, the heroine herself has turned out to be thoroughly regulated in her relationship to the builder. She intended to exploit him as a necessary and useful person. There can be no other ending when grass, people without clothing, and narrowly exclusive personal protest are opposed to communism. Zamyatin is in general a pessimist. With him the forces of stagna­ tion and inertia always triumph; the force of destruction overcomes them only for an instant, even though it wages a never-ending struggle. This dates from A Tale of the Provinces. That story has settled atop Zamyatin’s work with all its immobility and stagnation, its apparent constancy and inviolability. The artistic aspects of the novel are excellent. Zamyatin has attained full maturity here—so much the worse, for all this has gone into the service of a malicious cause. In his article about Wells, which in many respects is very good, Zamyatin touches on Wells’ book Russia in the Shadows and cites Wells’ opinion about the Russian communists which, according to Zamyatin, can be taken as the epigraph to the entire book. ”1 disbelieve,” Wells says, "in their faith, I ridicule Marx, their prophet, but I understand and respect their spirit.” Apropos of these lines Zamyatin writes: . .. Wells ... could not have spoken otherwise. A heretic, to whom any settled way of life or any catechism is unbearable, could not have spoken otherwise of the catechism of Marxism and communism; a restless aviator, to whom the old earth, overgrown with the moss of tradition, is more hateful than anything else, could not have spoken otherwise about an attempt to break away from this old world in some giant airplane, even if it is of unsuccessful construction.

Finally, he also writes very unsuccessfully and inarticulately about communism too. At one time it is the “church of God,” built on blood and with a foul smell, at another time a united and thoroughly regulated state where people are driven to happiness with the lash, or else suddenly—just look at that—a gigantic airplane, albeit unsuccessfully constructed, trying to break away from the earth which is overgrown with the moss of traditions. It is not thought out or complete, there are

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contradictions, there is no broad common grasp of things, and there is no “zest.” And furthermore, the “heretic” (Zamyatin loves the world)—the “heretic” Wells somehow, in his own way and with an inner feeling, understood the communist heretics of bourgeois civilization and said “I respect,” “I value,” "I understand.” But the author of A Tale of the Provinces, “At the World’s End,” “Alatyr,” and “The Islanders,” the preacher of provincial heresy and maximalism, did not find a better lot for himself during the years of severest struggle with the old world than to write works which by rights should be given the common subtitle “Down with Communism, the Communists, and October.” The “heretic” up to this time has not felt, nor has he made the reader feel through any of his works, that we, the communists, are the most dangerous of the heretics in relation to the old world. The most dangerous, the truest, the most hardened, and the firmest to the end. A strange heretic, a strange maximalism. He is much to the liking of the man in the street who has become hardened and stale in his discourses about identical noses by decree. And he is also to the liking of the Mr. Craggses, for whom Soviet Russia is like cast-iron heels or bombs over London. Zamyatin is on a very dangerous and inglorious path. This must be stated directly and firmly. And more from Wells—Zamyatin sympathetically cites the words of Peter-Wells,4 “We’ve got to live like fanatics. If a lot of us don't live like fanatics, this staggering old world of ours won’t recover.” We do not know just what Peter had in mind, but these are golden words if they are applied to the social struggle of our days. And we communists remember them well: we’ve got to live like fanatics. And if this is so, then what role is played by the narrowly individualistic considerations which the author particu­ larly values? A harmful, narrow, and reactionary role. It is necessary to be fanatical in a great social struggle. This means crushing ruthlessly everything which stems from a little beastie’s heart or from personal considerations, for it temporarily harms and hampers the struggle, and it hampers the victory. All triumph only when they act as one.

IV

Our article would be incomplete if we did not mention the influence, the specific gravity, of Zamyatin with regard to contemporary artistic life. He is undoubtedly significant. Suffice it to say that Zamyatin has in many ways determined the character and course of the circle called the

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“Serapion Brothers.” And although the Serapions maintain that they came together purely according to the principle of accord, that there is no trace of unity in their artistic devices, and, it seems, that they also “have nothing to do with Zamyatin,” it is nevertheless permissible to have doubts about this. From Zamyatin comes their enthusiasm for the word and their passion for craftsmanship and form; in accordance with Zamyatin's works, their works are not written, but rather are made. From Zamyatin stems their stylization, their experimentation (carried to extremes), their passion for skaz, the tension of their images, and their quasi-imaginism. From Zamyatin stems their contemplative, external approach to the revolution. I do not mean by this that their attitude toward the revolution is the same, although here too the taint of Zamyatin is felt among some. And if there is among the Serapions a tendency for the artist, like the biblical Jehovah, to create for them­ selves (and such opinions among the Serapions are not accidental), this is also from Zamyatin. Perhaps here, however, it is not so much influence as coincidence, but a striking coincidence.

Notes 1. Alexander Voronsky is best known for his literary activities while editor of the Soviet “thick" journal Red Virgin Soil from 1921 to 1927. The article translated here first appeared as the third of Voronsky's serious “literary portraits" in Red Virgin Soil, No. 6 (1922), pp. 304-322. Voronsky was one of the most liberal and openly style-conscious of Marxist critics, and from 1923 on was also a notable theoretician of the artistic creative process. From 1923 to 1927 Voronsky engaged in almost unceasing polemics with the proletarian literary group “October," which sought to establish its own hegemony in Soviet literature. Voronsky maintained that the writer, as an individual, must be allowed to work out his own social content and to elaborate his own style, and Red Virgin Soil was the main source of publication for the literary "fellow travelers.” Late in 1927, some time after the Octobrists had in effect gained control of Red Virgin Soil, Voronsky was arrested and exiled to Siberia. In 1930 he was allowed to return to Moscow, but was no longer associated with the journal. He was arrested again in 1935 and disappeared during the purges of the following years. The Small Soviet Encyclopedia lists the date of his death as 1943. A more detailed English account of Voronsky's literary life can be found in Robert Maguire, Red Virgin Soil (Princeton, 1968). The present essay has been reprinted in the Soviet Union on a few occasions (once in 1928 when the author was in exile). It was most recently reprinted in 1963, seven years after Voronsky's official rehabilitation as a Soviet writer. 2. An allusion to Gleb Uspensky's sketches of village life entitled The Manners of Rasteryaeva Street (1866). 3. An allusion to Gorky's story The Town Okurov (1909). 4. Voronsky refers to the hero of Wells' novel Joan and Peter (1918).

Translation and notes by Paul Mitchell

EVGENY ZAMYATIN’S CEILING1 Victor Shklovsky

Every airplane has its ceiling, the height above which it cannot rise, spread out like an invisible horizontal surface. The one-sided ability of Zamyatin most likely creates this ceiling for him. The usual tragedy of a writer is the question of his method. Zamyatin has a novel, We, which probably will appear soon in an English translation. Since this novel is still not published in Russian, due to accidental circumstances, I will not analyze it in detail. The novel represents a social utopia. Strange as it seems, this utopia recalls a certain parody of utopia by Jerome Jerome. This ap­ plies even in minor correspondences, for example, the clothes of the future people, both with Zamyatin and Jerome Jerome, is a grey tunic. The names of the people are replaced by numbers: even for men, odd for women, etc.2 In its basic intent and construction, the thing3 is most closely con­ nected with The Islanders (Ostrovitiane). The whole setting represents a development of the word “integration.” The country’s social system is a realization of “Vicar Dooley’s Testament of Compulsory Salvation.” One of the heroines, U, plays approximately the same role in the thing as Mrs. Dooley, etc. The heroes are not only square, but they think, in the main, about the equality of their angles. All the heroes have their themes which, so to say, constrain them: one, for example, is "scissors," and he doesn’t talk, he “snips." In my opinion, the world into which Zamyatin’s heroes have fallen is not so much similar to a world of failed socialism, as a world con­ structed by the Zamyatin method. That is, in general, we are examining not the universe, but its instruments. This world (per Zamyatin), no matter what it may be, is a bad and boring world.

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It seems to me, all the same, that this is the Zamyatinian ceiling. The author is helpless when he breaks out of it. In We there is a remarkable heroine, her brows cross in such a way as to form an X, she thus signifies in this equalized world—X. Of course, her brows are mentioned every time she appears. Sometimes the heroine leaves the equalized world, goes into the old world, the “Old House.” In this Old House she puts on a silk dress, silk stockings. A statue of Buddha stands in the corner. I fear that “Apollon” will be lying on the desk, or maybe “Stolitsa i Usad’ba.”4 Probably this happens because Zamyatin is unable to construct a world outside of his categories. The people who oppose the equalization call themselves "Mephi,” an abbreviation of Mephistopheles, because Mephistopheles signifies inequality. They bow down to this Mephistopheles. And also to a statue of Antokolsky.5 In vain. There is nothing worse in the world than Antokolsky. Despite a number of successful details in We, the whole thing is a failure and a clear indication that Zamyatin, within his old manner, has reached his ceiling.

Trans, by G.K.

Notes 1. The conclusion to an essay of the same title, published in a book of essays Piaf chelovek znakomykh (Five People I Know) in Tiflis, 1927. Shklovsky, a prominent Formalist, was quite close to Zamyatin in literary analysis and tone earlier in the twenties. A hasty emigration to Germany and a return to Russia under amnesty produced a marked change in attitude: this article represents a sad reversal in literary outlook. The bulk of it deals with Islanders, which Shklovsky interprets as a constriction of form due to a hyper­ trophic growth of imagery. 2. Shklovsky has the situation reversed. 3. The Formalists referred to a literary work as a "thing." 4. The first was the most luxurious pre-revolutionary cultural journal (St. Petersburg, 1909-17), the second devoted to "the capital and the manor." 5. Reference to the nineteenth-century sculptor, Mark Matveevich Antokolsky.

EVGENY ZAMYATIN1 M. N. Kuznetsov

In 1922 Red Virgin Soil wrote decisively: “Zamyatin is on a very dangerous and inglorious path.”2 By 1917 E. Zamyatin had already taken shape as a writer, although his books had appeared some four years before October. A Provincial Tale (Uezdnoe) immediately forced one to speak of him as an original artist; here both the ideological position of the author and his creative manner appeared in sharp relief. In the tale one finds the beastly exist­ ence of the Russian province, a heavy, terrible, downright zoological womblike way of life, a quagmire which swallows up everything human. However, Zamyatin here is not so much a naturalist as a satirist—malicious, unmerciful, he wrenches everything terrible and nightmarish from the Russian boondocks and lays it out in the open. In this satire there was a distinctive feature—bleak pessimism, admitting not a single ray of light. This told on the subsequent creative develop­ ment of the writer. The essential features of Zamyatin’s style were also revealed in A Provincial Tale: modernized skaz, full of allusions, sometimes with dou­ ble meanings; narrative speech with heightened imagery; intentionally sharp portraiture. Following Remizov and Belyi, he would exert an un­ questionable influence on the development of ornamental prose. The Revolution swept away that which had nurtured the nightmar­ ish world of A Provincial Tale. But the author of this tale never did understand the true meaning of the great social turnover. In the Revolution—he is not a fellow traveller, he is rather an enemy who as time goes on rebels more vehemently against that which was born by history. His stories written after October either fly away from the earth into some cosmic abysses, or this—stylized legends, and when he comes up against the new reality, he depicts it with ever greater hostility. The sadlyfamous story, "The Cave” (Peshchera), presents Petrograd dur­ ing the Civil War as a city frozen in a new ice age. All perish, the guardians of culture perish. The two heroes live in a room-cave, and in it, “as once in Noah’s ark: clean and unclean creatures mixed together 51

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before the flood: a writing desk, books, stone-age pancakes looking like potter’s clay. Scriabin opus 74, a flatiron, five potatoes lovingly scrub­ bed white, nickel bedsteads, an axe, a chiffonier, firewood and in the center of this universe—God. A shortlegged, rusty-red, squat, greedy, cave god: the cast-iron stove.” Cold, gloom, death, destruction of mankind, destruction of culture. Nikolai Aseev remarked wittily in regard to “The Cave” that the story turns from a "numb” (ledovitogo) chef-d’oeuvre into a chef-d’oeuvre of venom (iadovitosti) against the new order. Zamyatin attained his apogee of hatred for the Revolution in the novel We (My). At the beginning of the twenties this novel, in manu­ script copies, had a certain currency in literary circles. The editor of Red Virgin Soil, A. Voronsky, received such a copy and immediately wrote a long indignant letter to Zamyatin. It reads, in part: “Before me lies your novel We, received from Pilniak. A very grave impression. Honestly. Can it really be that October and what has trans­ pired to our most recent days inspired you only to this? What indeed is this ‘most jocular and most serious thing’? The most dismal and most misanthropic. It’s a bit early to shoot at us with such satires. Somehow you don’t look where you ought. Now take Wells, about whom you wrote so well and with such talent, he after all saw something positive and very big in us, the Communists, but you paint us only black. This is no good. It’s your affair, of course, and I’m not your advisor. We stand on different planes.”3 The planes, in truth, were so different that they may be called two camps—the Soviet and anti-Soviet. Voronsky considered it necessary, besides this, to come out pub­ licly against the novel We (though still not published at this time). In Red Virgin Soil No. 6, 1922, his long, sharp and profoundly just article on Zamyatin appeared, from which we cited the prophetic words about the dangerous and inglorious path of the writer. We is an example of a novel used as a weapon against us, against our order, against our literature. Marxist criticism openly polemicized with this novel, it is mentioned in Gorky's correspondence (naturally Gorky had an extremely negative attitude toward this novel, considering it harmful in thought and anti-artistic),4 essentially all of the young Soviet literature rejected what We had drawn. Finally, it is quite logical that precisely this novel was and is still raised as a shield by contempor­ ary American arch-reactionaries of literary study. In We there is neither verbal invention nor the engaging tie of ironic skaz, neither the "outpouring” of the unconscious nor pure portraiture. This was written not for a little coterie of esthetes, as with certain other

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stories of Zamyatin, but “popularly”—for the general reader. We is a straightforward, maliciously clear, rationalistic piece of agitation. Zamyatin has a pamphlet on England, The Islanders (Ostrovitiane): its poetics had an effect on We. “The pure experimenter” (thus he was called in the circle of the “Serapions”) turned into a ferocious political writer when it became a question of whether the bourgeois individual­ ism so dear to his heart would exist or not. From laboratory searches for new forms of skaz the writer switched “painlessly” to the novel-pamphlet, or more accurately the novel-slander. Zamyatin depicts the distant future. After a great two-hundred year war between the city and country the long-awaited One State was created. A certain “median majority” won out, equality is brought down to the anecdotal level. Now everyone has only a number, a golden badge with a cipher. Everyone lives by the Table of Hours—they get up at the same time, raise their spoons to their mouths at the same time, begin work at the same time .. . True, “an absolutely precise solution to the problem of happiness has not yet been found: from 16 to 17 and from 21 to 22 o’clock the single powerful organism breaks down into separate cells: thus the Personal Hours assigned by the Table.” Nevertheless, this too will be conquered by the “science of equality.” The hero-narrator writes with pathos: "... I believe: sooner or later, but someday we shall find a place for these hours as well in the general formula, someday all 86,400 seconds will enter the Table of Hours.” The hero of the novel is a mathematician, the builder of the inter­ planetary ship "The Integral," an ideal hero of the new world, who suddenly experiences a certain illness, for he ceases to perceive the world from the viewpoint of the table of reproduction. A medic locates the source of the illness: “a soul, apparently, has formed in you.” Such an ancient concept is not known to the hero. Then it is explained to him that the man of the future age has a mirror in place of the soul: “And on the surface we are with you, there—you see, and we squint from the sunlight, and the blue electrical spark in that tube, and over there the shadow of an aero flashed by. Only on the surface, only for a second. But imagine—from some kind of fire this impenetrable surface suddenly softens, and nothing slides over it anymore—everything penetrates into its depths, there, into this mirror world . . . And you understand ... a cold mirror reflects, throws back; but this one absorbs, and everything leaves a trace—forever.” And so, the order depicted by Zamyatin negates the soul and replaces it with a cold, unfeeling mirror. The people of the new world are ant-executors; fantasy—should it inadvertently rise in them—is cut out like a cancerous tumor. The heroine—1-330 (a number instead of a

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name)—is a woman-rebel who hails the new revolution in the future society; she proceeds under the banner of feelings, under the flag of love. The end of the novel is gloomy: 1-330 perishes, she perishes with­ out saying a word as she is tortured under the gas bell; her adherents perish . . . True, the revolt still rages somewhere in the blocks of the city, but the narrator, having betrayed freedom, the narrator-traitor and executioner, says that “Reason must conquer.” With Zamyatin reason is the most terrible reaction, the ruin of personality, the triumph of "antiness.” Zamyatin believed that he had written a pamphlet against socialism. A most profound delusion! The picture he painted has no­ thing in common with Marxist socialism. Here, rather, is something of Prussian regimentation, the dedicated state functionaries so brilliantly portrayed by Heinrich Mann. Marxism has never been reconciled with the primitive understanding of equality as a depersonalization of the individual. On the contrary, Marxism has always fought against this most reactionary conception of socialism! "Antiness,” the inhuman rub­ bing out of individuality, the extermination of freedom, the enforcement of discipline which kills freedom (the almost Jesuitic “be a corpse in the hands of the chief")—these were the raving ideas of arch-reactionary bourgeois political thinkers. It is also characteristic that We is absolutely devoid of any Russian, Soviet coloration—here everything is “mid-European,” like The Time Machine of Wells or a similar utopian novel. A. Voronsky was profoundly right when he wrote: “Zamyatin has written a pamphlet which relates not to Communism, but to Bismarckian, reactionary, Richterian state socialism. Not for nothing did he give new faces to his Islanders and transfer from that work into the novel the main features of London and Jesmond—and not only that, but the plot as well.”5 A characteristic stroke—Voronsky’s article speaks also of Zamyatin’s influence on the “Serapions.” This drew forth the sharp objections of these writers themselves. N. Nikitin wrote Voronsky: "I'm sitting at Zoshchenko’s . . . We see—the huge mistake of everyone who pastes on us the obligatory Zamyatin label . . . Zoshchenko says that we are not bound to him (that is with Zamyatin) by any kindred idea. This is not the teacher from whose every new work you expect a revelation.” And further Nikitin speaks even more sharply: “Zamyatin does not have a line without a little laugh. Zamyatin is always intriguing. The label ‘Zamyatinites’ is not only harmful, but fundamentally coarse. My credo is known to you: 'with the Bolsheviks!’ It’s not my custom to dress myself as a Red soldier.”6

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No less definitely did K. Fedin write Voronsky at that time: "I share your view of Zamyatin’s ‘symbolism’ completely—bad politics, indecent.”7 We—this is a bourgeois ideological diversion. The appearance of this novel shows once again how insubstantial are assertions about the possibility of some peaceful co-existence of ideologies. With good reason the most reactionary imperialistic circles in the USA have armed themselves with We. This work, so it is said, “aligns itself” with the most dismal creative works of contemporary bourgeois literature, aptly named "anti-utopias.” These anti-utopian novels try frantically to des­ troy faith in the coming human happiness; they are shot through with hopeless historical pessimism and a zoological hatred for the people, for democracy. Such are Brave New World by Huxley, 1984 by Orwell. Zamyatin truly took an inglorious and shameful path, to the ranks of the obscurantists who strive, as even one bourgeois literary scholar noted, to remove man from art. Every new day of the making of socialist society, every talented work on Soviet reality, depicting both the difficulties and the contradic­ tions and the dramas, but drawing all this honestly and truthfully—these have smashed Zamyatin's malicious fantasies to bits. From the novels of Tolstoi and Sholokhov, Serafimovich and Fadeev, Fedin and Leonov and many others there has arisen the free personality of the man of Soviet society, there has arisen the image of the socialist collective which elevates man and supports him in the most noble and daring undertakings. Translated by G.K.

Notes 1. A chapter from the book Sovetskii roman: ocherki (Academy of Sciences: Moscow, 1963), 131-36. The following notes are the author's own. 2. Krasnaia nov' No. 6, 1922, 321. 3. Cited from the book: A Voronsky, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i ("Sovetskii pisatel'”: Moscow). 4. In a letter to I. Gruzdev, Gorky writes: "We is desperately bad, a completely unfruitful thing. Its anger is cold and dry, this is the anger of an old maid.” (Sochineniia, vol. 30, p. 126.) 5. A Voronsky, "E. Zamyatin," Krasnaia nov’ No. 6, 1922, 319-21. 6. A. M. Gorky Archive. 7. Ibid.

ZAMYATIN O. N. Mikhailov

Entry in The Short Literary Encyclopedia (1964) Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (20.1.1884, Lebedian' Tambov district—10.111.1937, Paris.) Russ, writer. Grad, shipbuilding dept. Peterb. Polytech. Inst. Took part in the revol. movement 1905-07, suf­ fered persecution, from 1906-11 lived in an illegal status. Began to publish in 1908. Z.’s pre-revol. creative work developed in the traditions of Russ, critical realism—N. V. Gogol, N. S. Leskov—and was colored with democratic ideas. In 1913 Z.’s best tale was pub.—Uezdnoe (A Provincial Tale), portraying in grotesque satiric tones the womblike zoological way of life of provincial philistinism. In 1914 for his anti-war tale Na kulichkakh (In the Sticks) the writer was tried in court, and the issue of the journal Zavety in which the tale appeared was confiscated. In 1916 Z. went to England. The bourgeois civilization which trans­ formed man into a machine provided material for the satiric tale Ostrovi­ tiane (The Islanders) (1918) and the story Lovets chelovekov (Fisher of Men) (1918, pub. 1921). In the autumn of 1917 Z. returned to Russia, took part in the editorial work of the pub. house Vsemirnaia literatura (World Literature), the journals Dorn iskusstv (The House of Arts), Sovremennyi Zapad (Contemporary West), Russkii sovremennik (The Rus­ sian Contemporary). Z.’s post-revol. creative work is imbued with a hostile attitude toward the revolution, deep pessimism. In the article la boius’ (I fear) (1921) Z. asserted that Russ. lit. had “only one future: its past.” In Z.’s numerous fantastic-allegorical stylized stories, fable-parables and dramatic “pageants”—Peshchera (The Cave, 1920, pub. 1921), Mamai (1920, pub. 1924), Poslanie Zamutiia, episkopa obez'ianskogo (Epistle from Zamuty, ape bishop, 1921), Ogni sv. Dominika (The Fires of St. Dominic, 1920, pub. 1922), Attila (wr. 1928) and others—the events of the War Communism period and Civil War were grotesquely distorted and portrayed from anti-Soviet positions as a return to primitive "cave” existence. Z. also wrote the novel My (We)—a vicious pamphlet against the Sov. state. Its appearance abroad (pub. in England 1924) provoked the indignation of Sov. social

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comment. The novel had an influence on the West Europe. anti-Communist "anti-utopian” novel of the 20th c. (O. Huxley, Geo. Orwell). In 1925 Z. wrote the “popular amusement" Blokha (The Flea) on the theme of N.S. Leskov’s Levsha (Lefty) (Perf. 1925 by Studio 2 Moscow Dram. Art Th.). Certain aspects of Z.’s creative work (stylization, ornamentalism) exerted an influence on the lit. group “Serapion Brothers." In 1932 Z. went abroad, where he published no­ thing significant.

Translated by G.K.

MYTHIC CRITICISM

TWO ADAMS AND EVE IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE: DOSTOEVSKY, THE BIBLE, AND WE Richard A. Gregg

“Prophetic” is a quality which few thoughtful readers would deny Zamyatin’s We. For if its moral argument (the irreconcilability of “pure” communism and individual freedom) has, to a disturbing degree, been confirmed by the course of twentieth-century history, so have some of its boldest technological predictions (for example, state-enforced restrictions on human fertility, Communist-inaugurated space travel). Even its genre (an original blend of political satire and science fiction) has proven to be a prophecy of sorts, anticipating, as it does, the more celebrated satirical fantasies of Huxley and Orwell.1 That these oracles have impressed the readers of We is as it should be. That they have distracted them from less obvious aspects of the work is not. For, objectively considered, We is a Janus-faced novel. It looks backward as well as forward. The philosophical problem it explores had engaged one of the greatest Russian minds of the previous century; its closest literary ancestor is a classic of Russian literature; and, as we shall see, underlying much of its plot is a famous myth of Judeo-Christian religion. Only when the traditional aspects of We have been properly assessed can the edge of its satire be fully felt. The philosophical debt which the novel owes to Dostoevsky’s thought in general, and to Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov in particular, will not detain us long, for it has received its due elsewhere. The ethical dilemma confronting Zamyatin’s hero, D-503, namely, that freedom and earthly happiness are incompatible and that benevolent totalitarianism destroys the former as it ensures the latter, evidently derives—as Professor Peter Rudy has already noted2—from Ivan Karamazov’s legendary Grand Inquisitor, who rebukes Christ for refusing to trade man’s freedom for the miracles, mystery, and authority offered by Satan and praises the Church for having rectified the error. Another scholar, Mr. D. J. Richards, has called attention to a more far-reaching parallel when he noted that D-503 in "confiding to his diary his anti-social sentiments and his tortured speculations on the irrational nature of man becomes a 61

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literary descendant of Dostoevsky's hero in the Notes from the Underground.''3 As far as he goes Mr. Richards is surely right, but one wishes he had gone a little further. For the evidence suggests that Zamyatin drew artistic as well as ideological inspiration from the Notes—and not, perhaps, from the Notes alone. That the “underground caves’’4 which once housed the insurgent enemies of We derives from the spiritual “underground’’ which housed Dostoevsky’s enemy of society, or that the huge glass dome which encloses the United State is Zamyatin’s hypostasis of Dostoevsky’s hated Crystal Palace5—such debts cannot, of course, be proven. Similarly, one cannot be sure that the mathematically regulated existence of D-503 “invested in the sacred cyphers of the Table”6 derives from Dostoevsky’s vision of an arithmetical utopia where “all human actions will be tabulated by those laws, mathematically”;7 or that the regulated sex life of the citizens of the United State (pink slips, assigned hours) was inspired by Dostoevsky’s forecast of a race of robots who “desire nothing except by the calendar.”8 But, taken collectively, and in the light of Dostoevsky’s known philosophical influence on We, such correspondences raise suspicions. When Zamyatin’s "square root of minus numbers”9 (symbol to D-503 of the irrational in life) is compared with Dostoevsky's “extraction of square roots”10 (symbol for the purely rational life), these suspicions are bound to grow; and when the Dostoevskian leitmotif 2 x 2 = 4 (another symbol of rationality and finitude) is heard to reverberate in Zamyatin’s satirical hymn to rationalism: “Two times two, forever in love/ Forever joined in passionate four/ Most ardent lovers in the world/ Eternally welded two times two,”11 they approach something like certitude. Whatever ideas the Notes may have suggested to Zamyatin, the central metaphor or myth of his novel was drawn from a much older source, though it is possible that this debt, too, may have been suggested by Dostoevsky. The source in question is the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, which Zamyatin incorporated into his tale of a communist paradise, and the satirical uses of which Dostoevsky had—albeit in rudimentary form—anticipated in The Possessed. For when in the chapter entitled “Among Us” the revolutionary theoretician Shigalov12 predicts that mankind in search of a socialist utopia will “through boundless submission by a series of regenerations attain a primeval innocence something like primeval paradise" (a moment later it is called “an earthly paradise”),13 he is not only summarizing the prehistory of We but naming its central metaphor. And shortly thereafter, when Petr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, describing his own

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(perverted) concept of the future totalitarian society, exclaims to Stavrogin, “We shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We will build, we and only we!”14 he may have supplied Zamyatin with his title as well. But to gauge the possible extent of Zamyatin’s indebtedness to Dostoevsky is more difficult (and less important) than to see how the myth actually works itself out in the novel. The action of We has barely begun when Zamyatin drops his first small hint of the mythical shape of things to come. As D-503, still a joyful cog in the machine of the United State, passes proudly in review (Entry 2), he reflects that “not past generations, but I myself have won a victory over the old god and the old life, I myself have created all this”—a piece of pompous self-deception which the heroine (I-330) is quick to perceive. Addressing her future lover for the first time, she mockingly remarks: “I beg your pardon ... but you gazed about like an inspired mythological god on the seventh day of creation.”15 Although there is, in truth, nothing very godlike in the shuffling and neurotic D-503, his delusion is not without significance. For just as Adam, the servant and mortal replica of Jehovah, once labored for his Maker in the fields of Eden, so D-503, the dedicated architect, labors to improve the “glass paradise” (the phrase is his)16 of the Well-Doer. And it is precisely because the United State has restored that perfect community of interests between master and man which had once reigned in Eden (“The Ancient God and we [were] side by side at the same table,”17 the poet R-13 later explains to the hero) that “Adam’s” momentary confusion is possible. To do the Well-Doer’s will on earth is, of course, the vocation of our hero—a vocation which the crafty, beautiful I-330 seeks to subvert by inducing him to taste the delights of freedom and knowledge, that is, of Evil. In essence this is, of course, an imitation of Genesis. And just as the Biblical authors and their successors used certain traditional images to describe the fateful event—a forbidden food, a bite, a figurative fall, and sinful intercourse—so Zamyatin in relating D-503’s loss of innocence uses his considerable ingenuity to ring the changes on these symbols. The seductive charms of Eve and her first fatal bite are thus telescoped into the recurrent images of l-330’s sharp teeth and “bite-smile,” which have such a fatal fascination for D-503; the moral fall of Adam becomes literal in We: “Down, down, down, as from a steep mountain,”16 descends the hero into the site of his transgression (the Ancient House); it is there that a green and forbidden liqueur offered by I-330 replaces the forbidden fruit of Genesis, the consumption of which—here Zamyatin follows Milton rather than Genesis—on the hero’s next visit leads to sinful and guilty intercourse

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with “Eve." When it is all over, the latter pointedly remarks: “Well, my fallen angel, you perished just now, did you know that?”19 There was, in truth, no need to labor the point; for D-503 feels a guilt quite worthy of his ancestor departing through the Gates of Eden: "I, a corrupted man, a criminal,” he reflects in anguish, “have no place here. No, I shall never be able to fuse myself into the mechanical rhythm ... I am to burn eternally from now on, running from place to place, seeking a nook where I may hide my eyes.”20 Zamyatin exploits his myth in a manner that is neither mechanical nor, on the whole, obtrusive. Indeed, he drops his symbols so gently that their presence seems to have gone unnoticed. Perhaps it was to forestall such an event that on one occasion he expounds his Biblical design explicitly and in detail. His mouthpiece is the poet R-13, who in Entry 11 describes to D-503 the plight of the modern state in these unambiguous terms: You understand ... the ancient legend of paradise ... That legend refers to us today, does it not? Think about it. There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness . . . They, blockheads that they were, chose freedom.

And a moment later: It was he [the Devil] who led people to break the interdiction, to taste pernicious freedom—he, the cunning serpent. And we planted a boot on his head, and squash! Everything’s fixed. Paradise again! We returned to the simplemindedness and innocence of Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all that.2'

Of course the poet cannot know what the reader knows—that his interlocutor is at that very moment “meddling with good and evil” for all he is worth. And it is this very ignorance which allows him to deliver the coup de grâce, when he playfully adds: “Oh you . .. Adam! By the way—about Eve .. . ”22 The reader who accepts Zamyatin’s gambit and starts looking for further Biblical parallels will not be disappointed. He will note, for instance, that the Well-Doer becomes the Lord God of Genesis: “It was he, descending to us from the sky. He—the new Jehovah in an aero”;23 that his guardians (official custodians of virtue, that is, conformity) are angels: “He, my Guardian Angel,” writes D-503 of one of their number, “decided matters;”24 and that the world lying beyond the Green Wall of the United State and visited by the New Adam and Eve after the Fall (Entry 27) is clearly that wilderness "east of Eden” where the first sinful couple had taken refuge.

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But if We is to some significant degree Zamyatin’s ironic retelling of Genesis chapters 1-4, where, one may ask, is the Archfiend without whose odious designs and serpent's shape no account of the story would be complete or even meaningful? The answer is provided by that enigmatic friend of Eve, S-4711, whose letter stands for Satan, serpent, and snake alike,25 and whose collusion with Eve, “double-curved" body, manner of locomotion (“gliding over the ... glass ... the running body . .. like a noose"),26 and deceitful disguise (“ . . . if he should discard the deception of clothes and appear in public in his true form . . . Oh!”)27 make his diabolical vocation clear. And if the frivolous reader would inquire how such a deformed creature could have ever enjoyed the favors of the beauteous I-330, Zamyatin has a no less frivolous answer ready. For who could be more ingratiating, more insinuatingly seductive than he who wears the world’s most famous perfume for a name—4711? Subtlety, thy name is Eau de Cologne! Zamyatin does not allow such occasional playfulness to blunt the edge of his satire, which cuts deepest when it diverges most widely from its model.28 For if the Biblical argument is that in order to be worthy of God, Adam should have resisted Eve's blandishments, the moral of We is that to be worthy of man the new Adam ought to succumb to them. Hence, if Genesis is tragic because Paradise was lost, and man's happiness forfeited, its modern analogue is tragic because in the end Adam is saved, and his “glass paradise”—putatively at least—preserved. The use of ingenious mythical parallels can, as the record of contemporary fiction attests, become a habit-forming authorial indulgence. It should not, therefore, surprise us that midway through the novel Zamyatin is tempted to introduce a second Biblical pattern, though it is doubtful whether its artistic integration into the novel as a whole is entirely successful. The earliest trace of this can be found in Entry 20, when Zamyatin makes his penitent hero (he has illegally gotten 0-90 with child) ponder the equity of the death sentence awaiting him: "This [then] is that divine justice of which those stone-housed ancients dreamed, lit by the naive pink rays of the dawn of history. Their 'God' punished sacrilege as a capital crime."29 This rather shadowy equation of Christianity and communism evidently pleased the author (who was a friend of neither ideology), for two chapters later D-503, relishing the sensation of selfless solidarity with the community (he is going through one of his conformist phases), puts the case more clearly:

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Richard A. Gregg In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our only, though very imperfect, direct forerunners. They knew that resignation is a virtue, and pride a vice; that “We" is from God, "I" from the devil.30

Several chapters later the same conceit crops up again; this time, however, it is presented from the insurgents’ standpoint: "Our—or, more exactly, your—ancestors, the Christians, worshiped entropy like a god,” explains 1-330 to her lover. "But we are not Christians."31 That a disciple of Dostoevskian ethics could depart from his master’s metaphysics so far as to see Christianity as the father of communism was an irony which Zamyatin evidently understood and even exploited through parody. For as We draws to its tumultuous close, the hero finds himself in a situation (Entry 36) which bears a bizarre but unmistakable resemblance to that of Christ in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the philosophical importance of which has already been noted. Like Ivan’s Christ, though in a very different way, D-503 has tried to liberate mankind.32 Like Him, too; he has failed in his endeavor and has returned to earth, where he is taken prisoner and summoned into the presence of the austere and loving leader of the terrestrial forces for an accounting. Silent (like Jesus), he listens to the stern arraignment by his superior as the latter rejects the concept of freedom ("[Man] longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is, and then would chain him to it”),33 and defends the enemies of Christ: Remember—a blue hill, a crowd, a cross? Some up on the hill, sprinkled with blood, are busy nailing a body to the cross; others below, sprinkled with tears, are gazing upward. Does it not seem to you that the part which those above must play is the more difficult, the more important part? If it were not for them, how could that magnificent tragedy have been staged? True, they were hissed by the dark crowd, but for that the author of the tragedy, God, should have remunerated them the more liberally, should he not?34

Like the Grand Inquisitor, the Well-Doer knows that the forced benefactions of the good society outweigh the freedom which Christ—and now D-503—would offer. And the hero, whose forty days of temptation in the wilderness of doubt (there are forty entries in his journal)35 and thirty-two years of age at his “death" are obvious allusions to his Christlike role, feels a solitude akin to that of Jesus before His crucifixion: If only I had a mother, as the ancients had—my mother, mine. For whom I should not be the Builder of the "Integral," and not D-503, not a molecule of the United

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State, but merely a living human piece, a piece of herself . . . And though I were driving the nails in the corpse or being nailed to it (perhaps it is the same), she would hear what no one else could hear.36

Perhaps, indeed, his solitude is greater; for Jesus’ apostrophe on the Cross was, after all, addressed to Somebody. The New Saviour has no one. D-503’s ultimate decision is, of course, the opposite of Christ’s. Instead of dying so that men may be free, he lives so that they will remain slaves. Yet, paradoxically, even as he submits himself to the machine which makes soulless robots of its victims, he is—if we accept his own identification of communism and Christianity—behaving like a Christian. And in the words written on the eve of his self­ sacrifice—“Perhaps then [that is, after the operation] I shall be reborn. For only what is killed can be reborn”37—one can hear ironical overtones of the Christian promise that only he who loses himself shall find himself, or that to live in the spirit is to die in the flesh. To describe some of the more important symbolic patterns in We is not to affirm their artistic success. In particular, the compounded ironies occasioned by D-503’s appearance as both the First and the Second Adam seem to blur and blunt more than they intensify. And other symbolic allusions (I have not tried to discuss them all) raise similar doubts.38 But if We is read today, it is less for its artistic merits (which are uneven) than for the boldness and ingenuity of its satirical concept (which are very great). In this concept the Biblical patterns described here play a role of the first importance.

Notes

1. It is true that the futuristic novels of H. G. Wells (who strongly influenced Zamyatin) are not without satirical overtones. But whereas in Wells satire is a subsidiary and dispensable element, in We it is inalienable and essential. 2. Introduction to Eugene Zamiatin, We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg (New York: Dutton, 1959), p. viii (“Dutton Everyman Paperback”). 3. Zamyatin, a Soviet Heretic (London, 1962), p. 56. 4. Zamiatin, My (Russian text, New York, 1952), pp. 84-85. For the quotations from the text of My, I have drawn upon the translation by Gregory Zilboorg (see note 2 above), with minor modifications. 5. It is also interesting to compare Dostoevsky’s rebel who swears he will never "bring a single brick" to the building of the Crystal Palace (F. M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow, 1956], IV, 152) to Zamyatin's latter-day rebels, who by their apostasy have "lost their rights to be the bricks ... of the United State" (Zamiatin, p. 128). 6. Zamiatin, p. 13 7. Dostoevskii, p. 152.

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8. Ibid., p. 158 9. Zamiatin, pp. 37 ff. 10. Dostoevsky, p. 155. 11. Zamiatin, pp. 59-60. Richards (pp. 60-64) takes cognizance of this corre­ spondence but not of the others. 12. The words are actually pronounced by the "lame schoolteacher,” but they are an admiring description of Shigalovsim, and evidently have Shigalov’s approval. 13. Dostoevskii, VII, 423, 424. 14. Ibid., p. 442. 15. Zamiatin, p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 111. 17. Ibid., p. 56. 18. Ibid., p. 25 19. Ibid., p. 66. 20. Ibid., p. 74. 21. Ibid., p. 56. 22. Ibid. The fact that R-13 is referring to 0-90, while the reader (and no doubt D-503) have quite another "Eve" in mind is characteristic of Zamyatin's compounded ironies. 23. Ibid., p. 121. 24. Ibid., p. 96. Ironically, this Guardian Angel is, in fact, a fallen angel, for it is S-4711 that the hero is referring to. Since Satan, too, was once an angel, Zamyatin is being faithful to religious as well as literary tradition here. 25. The use of the Roman alphabet for the nomenclature of Zamyatin’s characters made punning difficult in Russian. His excellent command of English makes that language appear to be the likeliest candidate, although it is true that the play would also have been valid in French (Satan, serpent) or German (Satan, Schlange). The reader may wonder why Zamyatin did not try to slip in symbolic hints of the Genesis story in the other names. The answer is that he seems to have done exactly this. Thus, the phonetic value of Eve’s initial in English is rendered by the Cyrillic letter which, in turn, is the conventional written equivalent of the English letter "I.” Hence an identity of sorts between I-330 and her mythological archetype. If this seems a little far-fetched, it will be noted that the letter of the poet R-13 phonetically rendered in Russian is "P,” the graphic equivalent of which in our alphabet is, of course, also ”P.” Since Zamyatin’s poet was almost certainly a kind of avatar of Pushkin (see note 38 below), the initial once again fits the archetype. When it came to encoding the mythic name of the hero, Zamyatin encountered a special problem, since all the men in the United State had to have consonantal names. Unable to use Adam’s first letter, Zamiatin simply used the second one. 26. Zamiatin, p. 122. 27. Ibid., p. 50. 28. It does not follow, of course, that whenever Zamyatin’s plot diverges from Genesis we must look for irony. There are important narrative elements in We which are quite unrelated to the story of Eden. The myth is, after all, only one strand—though a very important one—in Zamyatin’s plot. 29. Zamiatin, p. 101. 30. Ibid., p. 111. 31. Ibid., p. 142. 32. D-503 tries to free his fellow men by turning his spaceship "Integral" over to the insurgent enemy. 33. Zamiatin, p. 184.

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34. Ibid., p. 183. 35. This may also have been suggested by Dostoevsky, whose underground hero was a symbolic forty years old. 36. Zamiatin, pp. 185-86. 37. Ibid., p. 193. 38. What, for instance, are we supposed to make of the hints which Zamyatin drops with regard to R-13? His status as the country's greatest poet, his somewhat negroid features, and his ebullient character—to say nothing of the fact that he composes hymns of praise to his country, but fights for individual freedom and eventually falls victim to the regime—all this cannot fail to remind the Russian reader of Pushkin. But it cannot be said that this identification, even if valid, helps illuminate the novel as a whole. More than anything, it seems like a private joke. Symbol hunters will also note the use of the seasonal cycle (spring fever at the beginning, autumnal resignation and defeat at the end), as well as water imagery (dripping faucets, bubbling fountains), which is clearly connected with the motif of freedom and revolt. Here, too, however, the artistic effectiveness of these symbols may be questioned.

ZAMYATIN’S WE AS MYTH Christopher Collins

Critical studies of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, whether philosophical, socio-political, or structural, have accepted it as a fiction­ al diary account of external life in the future by an engineer undergoing a spiritual crisis. Certain ambiguities involving D-503’s finger and 1-330’s appear­ ance and character are reminiscent of Gogol’s The Nose and Dostoevsky’s The Double, respectively, and suggest that a clearer, purely realistic interpretation of We might be obtained by carefully separating real life sequences from dream and hallucination sequences, as has been so well done in psychoanalytic studies of The Nose1 and of The Double.2 However, We resists such efforts and re­ quires a different approach. I hope to show that a reading of the entire novel as a myth relevant to the spiritual career of twentieth-century Western man is crucial to an understanding of the work's structure, meaning, and impact. Alienation, commonly considered the fundamental spiritual prob­ lem of modern man, can be regarded essentially as the dissociation of. the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, in the psyche and life of the individual. Closely related to this phenomenon is a compulsive longing for non-freedom, non-responsibility, and security, as evidenced by the totalitarianism mass movement on the one hand, and conformism on the other. But the unconscious may resist dissociation and the concomitant regressive desire for child-like security, and express itself in archetypal images in dream or myth. In either case, a representation of an inner, psychic conflict is staged. Archetypal figures represent various forces within the psyche and are brought into conflict. The stage in We is the city, representing the psyche. D-503's psyche-city is dominated by the rational, where "all of life in all its complexity and beauty has been minted for eternity in the gold of words" (p. 62).3 The unconscious is nearly completely suppressed, permitted limited expression only two hours a day during the Personal Hours, when “the mightly one organism separates into cells” (p. 14).

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The separate cell may engage not only in occasional regulated sexual relations, but in creative work as well, such as D-503’s writing of a journal. The deliberate repression and dissociation of the unconscious underlies the appearance of a group of archetypal figures and a battle for the integration of the psyche. It might be ventured that the novel suffers from having only one character, the protagonist-narrator, portrayed in any depth. The other figures, even considering they are seen entirely through the eyes of the protagonist, lack internal conflicts, and may seem uninterestingly consistent. But the one-sided, unreal quality of the figures surrounding D-503 is perhaps the first formal indication that the entire novel is a myth, populated not with separate individuals, each with his own ego-consciousness, but with archetypal figures, displaying "all the marks of fragmentary personalities .. . without problems, lacking self-reflection, with no conflicts, no doubts, no sufferings . . . ”4 The most important of these fragmentary personalities is I-330. She appears suddenly in the crowd in the street as D-503 reflects on the confusion of the long-past twentieth century. She hints at her psychic origin to D-503: "You seem so certain that you created me” (p. 9). Next, she begins to utter his own thoughts. The circumstances of her initial appearance, her character, her role, and her death all suggest she is a manifestation of D-503’s anima. The rationalistic ego has so long and so thoroughly repressed the female^Tement physiologically and psychically present in the male, that the anima manifests itself and attempts to guide the ego, to put him in touch with the unconscious. She seeks to make the ego receptive to female qualities—the irrational, love, and a feeling for nature. The anima of myth may be witch or fair damsel, may have, in fact, both good and evil aspects. l-330’s appearance at the concert is marked by a black piano, her black dress, her sharp teeth, and by the pain D-503 feels (18-19). Yet she is not wholly black; as she plays the piano D-503 feels the sun breaking through. On her first appearance in the Ancient House she provocatively dresses in black and yellow (p. 28) and often thereafter in yellow, signifying that there is sunlight within her as well as darkness. Like Goethe’s Helen of Troy, the animas in the novels of Rider Haggard, or Blok’s prekrasnaia dama, I-330 prefers historical dress. As the an/'ma-guide, I-330 introduces D-503 to the Ancient House—a museum representing the collective unconscious surviving in the rationalized psyche-city, just as primordial survivals are also manifested in the body, e.g., in D-503’s hairy hands, and in the few drops of “sunny, forest blood” (p. 140) in his veins. Once the anima has shattered his complacency, D-503 finds him­

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self "alone on a desert island" (p. 76), a barren psyche. But she is willing to help the ego find the self, to lead it to the world outside the prison-like wall. D-503 tells her, "There you are by my side, and yet it seems as if you were, after all, behind one of those ancient, opaque walls; through the wall I hear rustling and voices," to which she replies: “You want to learn everything? . . . And you would not be afraid to follow me?” (115-116). She inspires D-503 to a frenzy of lust, hate, and violence during the disorders on the Day of Unanimity. She later meets him at the Ancient House and conducts him through an underground passage of the spirit to the outside world. Above ground, at the same time, a hole in the wall of the psyche-city is being blasted. Now free in the outside world, and unconsciously realizing the emptiness of the psyche-city, D-503 sees it as being overwhelmed, inundated, a feeling R. D. Laing would term the fear of implosion by the ontologically insecure.5 In immediate reply to this concern over inner emptiness, the anima explains the real meaning of the hole blasted in the wall (and of the tunnel underneath it): “Oh no! We have simply gone beyond the Green Wall.” (p. 132.) Although her primary appeal is on the level of the unconscious, she also appeals in rational terms to the ego, in such explanations as: "They [the primitive people outside the wall] are the half we have lost... it is necessary for these halves to unite” (140-141). He is unable to be convinced finally by appeals either to his unconscious or to his ego, his participation in the rocket’s seizure notwithstanding. Yet her impact is literally devastating, as physical and spiritual confusion reigns in the psyche-city. Having won the struggle for possession of the Integral, the forces of tyrannical rationalism go on to triumph in the failure of the attempted maternal-monster murder, the death of the birds, the death of R-13, the appearance of the Benefactor, the operation, the repairing of the wall, and amid all this, the gradual death of I-330. Her final three appear­ ances reflect the death of the anima. Her first appearance after the rocket seizure fails is in the subway, in the underground of the psyche-city, where she makes a vain attempt to rally her supporters. One or two days later (Entry 38) D-503 awakens in the night in a fog and finds I-330 already in his room in a scene recalling the dream in Entry 18. She quickly learns of his betrayal, says a few words, and leaves him to brood away the rest of the night. The anima, previously accepted as a real person above ground, in the light of day, went underground after the rocket revolt, and by her next brief, middle-of-the-night appearance has almost faded into a dream figure. At the beginning of her final appearance in the torture chamber she and

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the entire unconscious have been so far repressed that D-503 has only the faintest feeling that there is something familiar about her. Not a sound is heard, no emotion is felt, and she is to be executed. The triumph of rationalism and non-freedom is complete. 0-90 appears to be the only named figure to represent a real, outer person. If the entire novel were a dream, the psychoanalyst might well demonstrate that 0-90 was a representation of the dreamer's real-life fiancée or wife, with whom he has difficulty establishing a mature relationship. The anima traditionally assists the ego to overcome his inability to have a mature relationship with a real woman. Sexual rela­ tions with the anima may cause a feeling of guilt, and the real woman may become jealous, but a fuller relationship with the real woman should be the result. After 1-330’s concert, D-503 has an exceptionally full sexual experi­ ence with 0-90, and she tells him of her desire for a child. He refuses the responsibility of fathering a child by her, excusing himself on the grounds that she is too short,6 and that childbirth would therefore be the death of her. (In the manifest story, the One State prohibits conception on pain of death. In the latent story, D-503 is relying on the thin excuse that her shortness would not permit a normal pregnancy and safe delivery.) Through the anima’s influence, however, D-503 begins to overcome his immaturity and consents to impregnate 0-90, to become, biologically at least, a father, a man. It is significant that conception occurs during intercourse with 0-90 sanctioned by 1-330’s pink check.7 D-503 offers to have 1-330 save her, but 0-90 refuses, and he must assume the responsibility of a father, be a man, and provide for the welfare of mother and unborn child himself. Though confessing he is obligated to save her (p. 163), D-503 never accepts this responsibility. His failure to be a true father is part of his over-all failure to be a human being. Yet 0-90, whom D-503 considers like all female numbers “completely incapable of abstract thought” (p. 35), escapes the realm of rationalism. Their child is to be born outside the Green Wall, and therein lies the only hope for the future. Yu- is the maternal monster the hero of myth must destroy to free himself from a regressive longing to return to the secure, un-free world of the infant. Yu-’s entire role and character is that of the smothering, domineering mother. She mans the entrance to D-503's apartment building, reads his mail, and "guards” (p. 138) him from the anima. She even desires him sexually. Her gill-like cheeks and her pupils’ carica­ ture of her as a fish recall the dragons (reptilian maternal monsters) of mythology, not to mention the myth of Jonah, swallowed by a whale and nearly suffocating in a womb-like security.8 She treats D-503 like her

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small son: "... you poor, poor thing” (p. 91); and ”... you, my dear, are also a child” (p. 107). She takes maternal pride in D-503’s worldly success: “You have surely heard of him? He’s always sitting at his desk like that—he absolutely will not spare himself.” (p. 144.) In her vocation as teacher of small children she represents the one mother small chil­ dren have in this paternalistic state. One might identify her with that state in D-503’s metaphor of "the maternal breast of the One State” (p. 168). That she is the only figure, major or minor, not to have a full name suggests that her identity as mother is too horrible to be faced directly. (One recalls the Medusa.) She and D-503 are the only figures to have Cyrillic letters in their names, possibly indicating a family connection. In a burst of filial enthusiasm described in Entry 21, D-503 reads her “a bit from my Twentieth Entry beginning with: ‘quietly, the thoughts click metallically’ ” (p. 106). If the reader turns back to the previous entry he will discover that this quotation from D-503’s journal precedes a passage referring to O-90’s pregnancy. The pregnancy and the plan­ ned seizure of the rocket are correctly seen by Yu- as D-503’s attempt to escape her mother-prison and to cleave unto another, hence she betrays her "child.” Realizing her role in frustrating his attempt at freedom, he then sets out, like the archetypal hero, sword in hand (a piston rod), to kill her. His failure to slay the maternal monster is another part of his over-all failure to achieve maturity. The dual-mother motif, common in mythology, is also present in the novel. Just as Yu- attends the entrance to the apartment building, a helpful, grandmotherly figure attends the entrance to the Ancient House. As a mythical “grand” mother, she represents a higher level of motherhood, the "just-so love” (prosto-tak liubov’, p. 26) D-503 longs for, in contrast to the devouring love of Yu-. As the novel begins D-503 has peacefully shared 0-90 with the Negro R-13 for three years. R-13 prefers a purely sexual relationship, poetry, or non-intellectual socializing. He replies to D-503’s proposal to do some mathematical problems for relaxation: “Let’s simply go over to my place and sit awhile” (p. 38). That R-13 is the male sexual drive within is emphasized by his being a Negro (a common image in the myths and dreams of white men) and by the constant spurting from his “repellently Negroid lips” (p. 122)—saliva and semen being often associated with myths. Being of the same sex as D-503 and possessing opposite qualities than those in the ego, R-13 fits the role of the arche­ typal shadow, having values needed by consciousness, but rejected by it. Through the help of the anima, D-503 comes to recognize the needs of his shadow, becomes lustful, jealous, and even strikes R-13. The ego is not attacking the male sexual principle, but rather is indicating

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that R-13 is no longer needed as a separate part of the psyche, since D-503 has (temporarily) incorporated maleness and is himself capable of taking from R-13 by force the bleeding, bare-breasted I-330. The close association of sexual and creative drives—a favorite theme of Zamyatin’s—is emphasized by R-13's writing verse to be carried on the rocket. R-13 is also by race and profession identified with the bust of the sexual and literary genius Pushkin found in the Ancient Horse. Jung observes that primitive man often has a bush-soul as well as his own, or even several bush-souls.9 The bush-soul may be an animal, a bird, or an inanimate object with which he identifies psychically through myth and symbolism. The rocket D-503 builds is a bush-soul. Its career parallels his own. Its flight is his flight. Its fire is his fire, and they are both extinguished together. The rocket is at once a symbol of transcendence, like the bird-like cranes constructing the Integral and like the birds flying into the city, and a symbol of the thrust of the unconscious against the conscious, fire against steel and glass, or (to use Zamyatin’s terms) energy against entropy. The rocket is associated with nature, creation, sexual intercourse, childbirth, and psychic and political revolt by the repeated image of fire contained by a shell but seeking to burst forth.10 As D-503’s relationship with his anima progresses, the Integral’s image changes. He first describes the Integral in terms of machines, materials, physics and mathematics, but later addresses it personally: “ . . . thou wilt shudder from the fiery, burning spurts within thy womb” (p. 155). D-503 acknowledges the rocket test blasts as "a salute in honor of her, the one woman [I-330]” (p. 93). The Integral’s name is ironic. The forces of rationality so named the spaceship in order to indicate its mission of integrating the universe on an entirely rational basis. But as the fruit of the creative mind, neces­ sarily incorporating the unconscious and the conscious, and (consequently) in its actual structure, the Integral represents a balance11 of thrust and containment, irrationality and rationality, a sort of model of an integrated psyche. As a model and as the means of escape from the prison of rationality, it is potentially a psychic integral, though not in the sense intended by the forces of rationality. A common myth of transcendence from one stage to a higher, more mature existence is the journey undertaken by the ego, guided by the anima, to a strange land. The anima takes D-503 to the strange land twice. The first journey is made underground while the second is made through the heavens, signifying the different routes of the transcenden­ tal journey. I-330 prevails on D-503 to help take the rocket, also his creative genius, away from the exclusive use of the rational. They seize

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the rocket briefly, escape the city, and hover over the strange, outer world. The forces of the Benefactor, assisted by Yu-’s unwillingness to let D-503 escape her embrace, crush the revolt. Rationalism still needs the forces of the unconscious, but insists on absolute control of them: “The Integral shall not be yours! The trial flight shall be carried out to the end, and you yourselves . . . with your own hands, will carry it out.” (p. 174.) The annihilation of the unconscious at novel’s end implies the rocket will never fire again. The Benefactor is the Great Man within. He is omnipotent, God-like, appears at crucial moments in the life of the psyche, sits in the center of the psyche-city on a cube, and liberates the ego from the destructive potential of the anima, in short, is an archetypal image of both God and Self.12 But if this rationalistic, authoritarian slavemaster is the Self, at once the center and totality of the psyche, whence came I-330 and R-13? Marie-Louise von Franz notes that the Great Man, or Self, of some myths is a false one, an imitation of outside religious forms, who, lacking any sense of humor, is fanatically convinced he has solved the riddles of the Cosmos.13 The frequent appearance of the Lenin-like, Socratically bald-headed man, and his mysterious silence, lead D-503 to sense this old man will play a crucial role in his life: “[In the room] to the right, over a book, is a knobby bald head, and a forehead like an enormous yellow parabola. The furrows on the forehead are a series of yellow, illegible lines of print. Sometimes our eyes meet—and then I feel: these yellow lines have to do with me.” (p. 179.) Only as rationalism triumphs at the end does the bald-headed man speak, exclaiming he has proved there is no infinity. But he is not only a bald-headed citizen, and a victim of the operation the Benefactor orders, he is also the Benefactor himself (see his description in Entry 36). As Benefactor, he appears four times. First, in a ritual sacrifice recalling pagan and Christian rites of transformation, he executes a rebellious poet. The transformation of blood into water may also be seen as an effective image of the dissociation that dominates this myth. (Referring to the blood and water, Zamyatin uses the word dissotsiatsiia on page 44.) In his next appearance he presides over, and is re-elected during, the Day of Unanimity festivities. Here he speaks (briefly) for the first time: “Those for. . . those against?” (p. 123.) D-503 pays ritual homage to the Benefactor on both occasions, although in his private life he is staging a revolt against the Benefactor, this Self copied from the outer religion. The Benefactor will not permit purely formal obeisance, but, speaking fully (for the first time) in his third appearance, crushes D-503 with logic. D-503 is unable to defend irrationality in

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rational terms. In his fourth and final appearance the Benefactor has already annihilated the unconscious, is torturing the anima, and will execute her on the morrow. Like the mandala, another archetypal image of the psyche, the city is laid out in a circular and four-folded geometric pattern. At the center is the Plaza of the Cube surrounded by sixty-six concentric rows of seats. Through the streets of the city march “quadrangles" (p. 108) of marchers, displaying "the square harmony of their gray-blue ranks" (p. 9). Aniela Jaffé observes that in the traditional mandala, the circular and the four-folded are completely integrated, symbolizing the connec­ tion between the circle (the psyche) and the square (earthbound matter, the body), but that “in most modern art, the connection between these two primary forms is either non-existent, or loose and causal ... [a] symbolic expression of the psychic state of twentieth-century man. .. ,”14 In D-503’s psyche-city the mandala is distorted, the square dominates the center; the circular is connected only by its complete submission to the four-folded. The gaze of those seated in the concen­ tric rows of seats is necessarily directed upward toward the gigantic Cube in the center, where executions take place. The Cube is also in shape and role a sort of Earth-altar, representing, as does the Benefac­ tor seated upon it, the Self to which the ego must submit. The inhabitants of the psyche-city are not permitted to walk the streets at night, which is to say, as /s said, that no dreaming is permitted. Set aside as a museum of the psyche is the dark-red Ancient House, to which the anima introduces D-503. The Ancient House is l-330’s locale. Jung notes that the anima lives and functions in the collective unconscious, as evidenced by her frequently historical dress, and by her bringing to consciousness the unknown psychic life of the past.15 The chaos of line and color inside the Ancient House is too much for D-503 to bear at first, but the house does not remain a dusty museum of the psyche, but becomes its center, from which come "the axes of the X’s, the Y’s, and the Z's, upon which of late my entire universe is built" (p. 80), and the place in which D-503 finds a tunnel out of his prison to the outside world. The many archetypal images and patterns shown above lead the reader, consciously or unconsciously, to recognize the entire novel as a myth. If the central trope in Gogol’s style is termed the downwarddirected metaphor, so might Dead Souls be read as a sort of downward-directed myth of the Holy Grail. And Chekhov, whose work

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Zamyatin also admired, places many of his stories within the framework of classical and literary myths,16 but proves them in character and situation banally inferior. If Gogol’s myth is grotesque and Chekhov’s banal, Zamyatin's is horrific. His myth is peopled with strong, serious figures engaged in a deadly archetypal struggle. But the myth does not have the ending we expect—the maternal monster survives, the anima dies, Perseus does not slay the Medusa and save Andromeda, and a false Self triumphs. Not only does psychic wholeness remain unachieved, but the protagonist, a representative of modern man, loses what little human qualities and possibilities he possessed in the beginning. The impact felt at the novel’s end derives from the violent denial of the expectation of the eventual victory of the true Self that myth encourages.

Notes

1. I. D. Ermakov, Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N. V. Gogolia (Moscow, 1922). 2. Erik Krag, "The Riddle of the Other Goljadkin: Some Observations on Dostoevskij's Double," in Morris Halle, et al., For Roman Jakobson (’s-Gravenhage, 1956), 265-272. 3. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the first Russian edition of the novel: Evgenii Zamiatin, My (New York, 1952). Translations of quotations are mine, although I have also consulted B. G. Guerney’s translation in his An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period (New York, 1960). 4. C. G. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation," in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (New York, 1953), IX, 286. 5. F. D. Laing, “Ontological Insecurity," in Hendrik Ruitenbeek, ed., Psychoanalysis and Existential Philosophy (New York, 1962), 41-69. 6. A synopsis of My in Zamyatin’s papers in the archives at Columbia University explains that 0-90 was not permitted motherhood by the One State because of her failure to meet the Maternal Norm in height. 7. Carl Proffer ("Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin's We," SEEJ, VII [1963], 269-278) discusses the color symbolism in the novel. He does not mention the pink check sanction­ ing sexual intercourse. Pink is, of course, a mild, diluted version of red, the color of passion. (Nor, in the case of the Green Wall and the green liqueur, does he note that, physically and metaphorically, green stands between yellow and blue.) 8. For this interpretation of the Book of Jonah, see Erich Fromm’s The Forgotten Language (New York, 1957), 20-23. 9. C. G. Jung, "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," Works, XI, 133. 10. Proffer observes the image to be the central one in the novel but does not mention the rocket at all. 11. Although best known for his advocacy of energy, irrationality, and heresy, Zamyatin fell a balance was necessary. He slates the case for an "integral" in his essay "O sinlelizme,” Litsa (New York, 1955), 239.

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12. Jung argues that the symbols of the Self and the God-image are empirically indistinguishable. See "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,’’ Works, XI, 194. 13. Marie-Louise von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," in C. G. Jung [ed.], Man and His Symbols (New York, 1964), 216-217. 14. Aniela Jaffé, "Symbolism in the Visual Arts," in Man and His Symbols, 249. 15. C. G. Jung, "Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation," Works, IX, 285-287. 16. See Thomas G. Winner's "Myth as a Device in the Works of Chekhov," in Bernice Slote, ed., Myth and Symbol (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), 71-78.

1-330: RECONSIDERATIONS ON THE SEX OF SATAN Owen Ulph

I In the winter of 1917, Eugene Zamyatin, weathering the sulky fogs of the London Dockyards, directed the construction of icebreakers.1 It was a task symbolic of his literary mission—so elegantly symbolic that it is one of those captivating instances in which Life overtakes Art. His icebreakers were successful against the solid surfaces of the polar seas, but his creative assault upon the frozen dogmas of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers2 encountered such resistance that Zamyatin was, ultimately, compelled to back away. Zamyatin returned to Russian from England on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power, witnessed the dismal vicissitudes of civil war and Soviet reconstruction, and wrote with sardonic wit in 1922, “I regret that I did not experience the February Revolution and know only October... It was as though I never tasted the delights of courtship and awoke one morning to discover I had been married ten years.”3 The edge of the simile cuts sharply. Marital bliss was not a condition to which Zamyatin gave much credibility. “The beautiful woman in legal marriage,” he wrote on one occasion, “is only Mrs. Everybody with curlers in her hair at night and head-ache complaints in the morning.”4 The contrast between the glamour of the Revolution and the dowdiness of its aftermath was expressed in another instance in which, referring to the early stages of rebellion, he remarked, “The Revolution was not yet a lawful wife who jealously guarded her legal monopoly. The Revolution was a young, fiery-eyed mistress and I was in love with the Revolution.”5 This mood of passionate infatuation grew increasingly difficult to sustain. By 1923, venting his contempt for the repressive, spiritless censorship of the new regime, Zamyatin was trying to con­ vince an obtuse bureaucratic dictatorship that “the Revolution should not be treated like a consumptive maiden who must be protected from every draft.”6 This curious, miscegenous coupling of sex and politics is charac­ 80

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teristic of Zamyatin’s unusual power to bring congruence out of appa­ rent incongruence. It is a quality which pervades his tensile and fre­ quently astonishing imagery and symbolism. It attains its most fanciful and provocative expression in his creation of I-330, like many a legen­ dary femme fatale, a type of half-caste. With audacious deftness, Zamyatin crosses Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci with the disciplined, dedicated woman of the Russian revolutionary tradition—a tradition which, in fact and fiction, includes such characters as Sofya Perovskaya, Olga Lyubatovich, Alexandra Kollontai, a bevy of Veras (Pavlovna, Filipovna, Zasulich), and numerous stony nymphs with cores of iron. Both history and literature are replete with lurid hetairae who have escorted men to their doom, causing them to fritter away the old homestead, desert their wives and children, sell their mothers into slavery, betray their country and squander empires while writhing in the alternating throes of ecstasy and despair. In most instances such women, despite their allure, are only the Devil’s serving wenches. It was Zamyatin, a Prince among black heretics, exploring the revolution­ ary potential of romantic agony, who created a woman worthy of inclu­ sion in Mario Praz's taxonomy of the sundry metamorphoses of Satan himself. Orwell’s Julia, a character inspired by Zamyatin’s heroine, is just another Eve driven from the Garden along with the dupe she has led down the path of Temptation. What makes I-330 unique is that her witchery is used to re-enforce the spirit of creation. In her ignited person, the conflict between good and evil is eternally resolved. All opposites are synthesized. She becomes the incarnation of the Absolute—the Urgeist—the unwavering advocate of the glory of permanent, unrelenting rebellion. "Why do you think there is a final revolution?” she asks D-503, who has been lulled into accepting the belief that the revolution which created the United State was the ulti­ mate one. "Only thermic contrasts make for life, and all over the world there are evenly warm or evenly cold bodies. They must be pushed off! In order to get flame—explosions! And we shall push.”7 l-330’s words echo those of Sofya Antonovna who, addressing the police spy in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, says "Life, Razumov, not to be vile, must be a revolt—a constant, pitiless protest.”8 Unlike Dostoevsky, whose influence upon him has too often been stressed without being delineated, Zamyatin does not sink into the abject mire of slave-morality. There are no Father Tikhons or Zossimas to skim spiritual spoils from the predicaments of his characters. There are no velvet-souled prostitutes whose self-abasement and woeful suf­ ferings point the way to salvation. If, indeed, Huysman’s choice be­

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tween “the muzzle of a revolver or the foot of the cross”9 was the only pair of alternatives open to a sensitive intellect, Zamyatin would choose the former—as, in fact, 1-330 finally does in such an insolent and une­ quivocal fashion that the reader receives the impression that the char­ acter snatched the decision away from the author. If Zamyatin eschews Superman in his treatment of D-503, it is only to exalt Superwoman. 1-330 is, herself, the embodiment of the transvaluation of values. She is the female Scythian. Pure solar energy fires the crucible containing the element from which she is wrought. Let us don our smoked glasses and examine her more closely in her dialectic duality—siren and revolutionary—the woman who did not intend that the universe should rest!

II Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath The agonies of anguish and of death.10

1-330 first materializes in Zamyatin’s terrifying apocalyptic tale of the future as a set of teeth. All the better to eat you with, my dear! The "white, very white,” sharp, vampire-like teeth, ever ready to bite, haunt the timid D-503 throughout the narrative. He is still fascinated by them even after his Fancy has been expunged in the Great Operation by which the United State preserves its immaculate, immutable sanctity against the uprising of the Mefi and 1-330 has been lodged in the Glass Chamber for final extinction. Behind this prominent dental display is “an unfamiliar face” which suggests to D-503 “a strange, irritating X.” All the better to confound you with, my dear! What more disturbing and corrupting quality can a woman possess than that of mystery—the quality that beckons one to pursue compulsively into the abyss of self-destruction? It is this quality in 1-330 that is a direct assault upon D-503's logical, predictable, geometric, crystalline world within the transparent Wall—the world that constantly prompts him to begin each sentence with the catechismic, “It is clear that ..." Throughout their relationship, the worlds of D-503 and 1-330 are in constant collision with no buffers to absorb the concussion. "I am afraid to lose in 1-330 perhaps the only clue I shall ever have to an understanding of all the unknowns,” D-503 writes, rationalizing his increasing infatuation. “The

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unknown is naturally the enemy of man. And homo sapiens only be­ comes man in the complete sense of the word when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas and periods.” Opposed to this is the position of 1-330 who, speaking raptur­ ously after the riots on the Day of Unanimity, her torn unif exposing a naked breast—an image reminiscent of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—breathes passionate words through sparkling white, clenched teeth. "Tomorrow, nobody knows what... do you understand? Neither I nor anyone else knows; it is unknown! Do you realize what a joy it is? Do you realize that all that was certain has come to an end? Now . . . things will be new, improbable, unforeseen!” Zamyatin draws his reader’s attention from the haunting, X-like face of 1-330 downward to her serpentine body, “slender, abrupt, resistantly flexible like a whip ...” All the better to beat you with, my dear! Again we are presented with an image of dual purpose. The whip which the merciless Belle Dame uses to lash naked Arthurian knights can be used to goad men from lethargy—to flail the senses and awaken desire—to arouse the elation derived from the pleasure that cannot be divorced from pain. The mission of 1-330 is not senile happiness, but anguish. “Desires are tortures, aren’t they?” she asks D-503, and then proceeds with biting ironic mimicry, "It is clear, therefore, happiness is when there are no longer any desires ...” (Italics mine). Before 1-330 departs, “little horns” appear at the corners of her brows. Teeth. An X. A whip. Horns. The demonic vampire image is branded on the reader’s mind. D-503, and anyone who identifies with him, is damned. L'ephémère ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle, Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau! L'amoureux pantelant incline sur sa belle A l'air d'un moribond caressant son tombeau.11

The reassuring kisses which, after his initial encounter with 1-330, he bestows upon his tidy, plump little legal consort, 0-90, whose mind and body comfortably resemble a dumpling, do not reassure. They only accentuate the shadow that foreordains the inevitable Fall of Man. Although D-503 squirms, struggles against his destiny and embroiders elegant lies for his private, personal deception, his fall is terrifyingly swift. He has no genuine wish to escape the spell that 1-330 has cast upon him. The elfin grot to which La Belle Dame whisks him is the Ancient House—symbol of the condition to which 1-330 has visions of a return. Since the United State is, on the surface, the embodiment of

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Unimprovable Perfection, 1-330’s smoldering revolution can only be regressive and all symbols employed to express it must be archaic ones. While D-503 is, indeed, bewitched, he is not simply a chance victim. The hair on the back of his hand, which infuriates him as an atavistic flaw constantly reminding him of his kinship with the ape, 1-330 finds appealing. At the Ancient House, D-503 is again exposed to white teeth that seem poised to bite into his flesh, l-330's laughter assails him like a whip. Fire images abound. He is seered by her blazing eyes as she tempts him to accept the corrupt services of one of her accomplices in the Medical Bureau who would issue a falsified certificate of illness, thus releasing D-503 from compulsory attendance at the State Auditor­ ium and permitting him to remain in 1-330’s nefarious embrace. D-503 recoils in fear and horror at the suggestion. He panics and reaches for the cold brass knob of the door. But he does not escape in time to avoid hearing her cold brass voice place a telephone call, the significance of which explodes within him a few minutes later when he has taken refuge in the sanctuary of the State Auditorium. She was still at the Ancient House. With another! The sorceress, 1-330, is not above using human devices to ensnare her victim. But to D-503 such devices are sub-human. “Is it possible,” he asks himself, “that the insanity called love and jealousy actually exists and is not confined to the idiotic books of the ancients?" A few days later D-503 hears rumors of the existence of a subver­ sive underground opposition. Can his house of glass be threatened with cracks and imperfections? He recalls childhood tantrums, stamping his feet at the concept of the square root of minus one, which took posses­ sion of him like some malevolent spirit that could not be exorcised. “This irrational root grew into me as something strange, foreign, terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought away. It could not be defeated because it was beyond reason.” The parallel of the square root of minus one to 1-330 is unmistakable. When 1-330, in accordance with the Lex Sexualis of the State (“a Number may obtain a license to use any other Number as a sexual product”) issues a pink check on D-503, he goes to her apartment and experiences one of the most sadistic, frenetic and comical seductions of the faltering male by the determined vamp in Western literature. "Suddenly her arms were about my neck . . . her lips grew into mine . . . no, even somewhere much deeper, much more terribly.” His code wrestles ineffectually with the primordial beast within. "I swear all this was very unexpected for me. That is why perhaps ... for I could not—at this moment I see clearly—I could not myself have the desire to ...” As 1-330 injects him with that ancient poison, alcoholic beverage, all falter-

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ing ceases. D-503 turns into a ravening Mr. Hyde! “I saw my other self grasp her rudely with his hairy paws, tear the silk, and put his teeth in her flesh! ... I remember exactly, his teeth ..." Alas! Before he can consummate his passion the time allotted him by the pink check has expired. He cannot be caught in the street after twenty-two thirty. The shadow of the Well-Doer, Chief Executive of the United State, blots out the wild, captivating radiance of 1-330. "My insanity disappeared at once,” D-503 writes. “I was again I. I saw clearly one thing: I hated her, hated her, hated ..." He races from the room, but his salvation is illusory. That night he is unable to sleep. In the United State the law reads: “At night all Numbers must sleep.” Not to sleep is criminal. "I was perishing,” he cries out, “I was unable to fulfill my duties to the United State! I ... ” The moral disintegration of D-503 proceeds rapidly as he suc­ cumbs to the hypnotic power of 1-330. He violates another basic law. He is late to work. Eventually he absents himself from work for extended periods. Where once he had refused, he comes to accept the fraudulent certificates of illness made out for him at 1-330’s instigation by the scissor-lipped doctor in the Medical Bureau. "Thus I stole my work from the United State," he confesses like a repentant sinner. "I was a thief. I deserved to be put beneath the Machine of the Well-Doer." He consorts with 1-330 without the legal sanction of the pink checks. His thralldom becomes an agonizing rack. When 1-330 fails to meet an appointment, he wanders about distractedly and ultimately appears in the Medical Bureau where he learns that "apparently a soul had formed in him.” This disease seems to be developing into an epidemic and one staff physician recommends immediate, wholesale surgery on all victims. D-503 is spared the finality of surgery only by the intercession of the scissor-lipped doctor-friend of 1-330. The doctor speciously points out that as Chief Designer of the space-ship, Integral, an operation might impair his usefulness to the United State. Evidence of an “underground" grows increasingly pervasive. There have been too many strange episodes to be accounted for by coincidence. A saboteur is apprehended on the Integral. The spectral spy, S-4711, instead of escorting D-503 directly to the Operation Department where the "soul” would have been immediately excised, brings him to the Medical Bureau where he is "rescued” by 1-330’s associate. Could all these pale warriors be agents of a vast organization directed by the Witch Queen? D-503, his intellect paralyzed by his emotions, is now ripe for political conversion. 1-330 acquires another dimension and, on the surface, undergoes apparent metamorphosis. To the role of La Belle Dame Sans Merci she now adds that of disciplined revolutionary. Sex and

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politics fuse in her struggle with the United State for the custody of D-503’s badly battered Will.

Ill

In a detailed study of Zamyatin, Alex Shane states, "1-330 does not really love D-503, but simply is using him as a tool to further the aims of the revolutionary ’Mefi.’”12 Shane adopts this male-chauvinist point probably because he has so completely identified with D-503 that he falls into the same psychic traps that Zamyatin set for his muddling, middle-class intellectual anti-hero. "Is it possible,” the Well-Doer asks D-503 during the interrogation that takes place after the failure of the plot to hi-jack the Integral, "that it never really occurred to you that they (we do not yet know their names, but I am certain that you will disclose them to us), that they were interested in you only as the Builder of the Integral? Only in order to be able, through the use of you—” The italicized use of they is Zamyatin’s. To D-503 they is a euphemism for she. “Don’t! Don’t!” he screams, but continues, “it was like protecting yourself against a bullet with your hands.” The State accomplished its purpose. It planted the insidious seed of doubt in the mind of Alex Shane as well as D-503 and broke the bond of faith that creates Humanity and alone stands in the path of the Absolute Soulless Collective. I-330 is divinely aware of the nature of this bond, but D-503, with his incurable narcissism (after the audience with the Well-Doer he takes refuge in sickening, hysterical mother-seeking fantasies) and his stubborn addiction to formal logic, cannot comprehend this simple, elemental truth. Ultimately it is D-503 who betrays I-330 and not I-330 who betrays D-503. By employing her talents as temptress only for ulterior purposes she would be doing violence to the fulcrum of her convictions. She joyfully enlists the support of D-503 in the revolt of the Mephi, but only when she believes he is capable of becoming one of them. Her love and her anarchistic politics derive from the same pre­ mises and are blended in an indissolvable unity. For I-330 feeling and action exist as ends in themselves. There are no metaphysical dilemmas, no perplexing antinomies, no bewildering problems concern­ ing the relationship between ends and means. All scholastic subtleties are swallowed in the infinite vortex of life. "Our ancestors were right,” she declares, “a thousand times right! But they did one thing wrong; they began to believe they were the last number, a number that does not exist in nature . . . We Mephi know that there is no last number. We may forget someday. Of course, we shall certainly forget when we grow

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old, as everything inevitably grows old. Then we shall inevitably fall like autumn leaves ..." 1-330 is a daughter of the Sun—and Dionysius, too. Flaming, tempestuous, resplendent. "Never before had I seen her in such a state,” D-503 exclaims. And for the moment he is transfigured. But D-503 is a congenital defective, a chronic backslider who should never have emerged from the womb, in short—a liberal. Despite the fact that 1-330 has blasted the foundations of his schematic world and fired him with the secret of the universe, a vexatious dialectic continues to rage inside him. Nagged by doubt, he continues to cerebralize, searching for intellectual convictions to justify his intrinsic moral cowardice. Only in moments of crisis, prompted by frenzy, does he stumble to the brink of the heroic. Once, on the Day of Unanimity during the election riots, he seizes 1-330 who has curled his marrow by openly raising her arm in opposition, and carries her hurriedly to safety. Once, when he has been escorted beyond the Green Wall and witnes­ ses 1-330, a coal black silhouette against a brilliant sky, instigating the Mephi to seize the Integral, he springs to a rock and shouts, “Yes, yes, precisely. All must become insane; we must become insane as soon as possible! We must: I know it.” Again, when the plot to seize the Integral has foundered and 1-330 suspects him of having been the informer, he attempts to ground the ship in a rash demonstration of loyalty to 1-330 and her rebellious cause—only to be slugged from behind by the Second Builder. Most of the time, however, he vacillates, equivocates, oscillates between polarities, and engages in endless intricate rationalizations. 1-330 is aware of his unreliable temperament and sub­ jects him to severe tests. "I must be sure that you will do anything I wish,” she says, "that you are completely mine.” “Yes, completely,” he assures her. 1-330 gives another turn to the screw and mimics his past recitations of duties due the State. Her irony is withering and D-503 winces. It is not her irreverence for the State, nor his own incipient treasonable conduct that are the sole causes of his mental disturbance. Pangs of jealousy gnaw at him. He inquires about the Ancient House and of the men he had seen in her company. "You want to know all?" she asks. "Yes.” “And you would not be afraid to follow?” “Anywhere!" “All right, then. I promise you, after the holiday, if only ..."

and then she carelessly intrudes an afterthought, “Oh, yes, there is your Integral. I always forget to ask. Will it soon be completed?” Small

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question marks, like fish-hooks, sink into his flesh. Why did she sudden­ ly inquire about the Integral? What is 1-330 really testing? D-503’s corruptibility? The degree of his loyalty to the United State? These questions have only an indirect bearing on the issue with which she is really concerned. She is probing to discover the depth of his love—measuring its intensity and purity. 1-330 wishes to reciprocate the love of D-503, but she is unwilling to bestow her flawless devotion on someone unworthy to receive it. Here is the type of love to which Zamyatin referred in his essay on Sologub, “the love which demands all or nothing, that absurd, incurable, beautiful disease . . . ”13 Instances can be cited in which I-330 appears to place the Revolu­ tion above D-503, but these isolated cases are superficial. They consist only of temporary inconveniences imposed on him while she carries out immediate party tasks. Moreover, there is no basic contradiction be­ tween her loyalty to the Revolution and her loyalty to D-503. Only in the fertile soil of revolution can the love of I-330 and D-503 reach fruition. Triumph of the United State is the triumph of death. But so is the triumph of I-330. D-503 formulates this thought into a fantastic equation. "In order to establish the true meaning of a function one must establish its limit,” he remarks. “Death is the complete dissolution of the self in the universe. Hence L = f(D), love is the function of death.” He is seized with intellectual hysteria. “Yes, exactly, exactly! That is why I am afraid of I-330; I struggle against her. I don’t want..." His final tragic dilemma is foreshadowed by his logic: Why is it that within me ‘I don’t want to’ and I want to’ stand side by side? That is the chief horror of the matter; I continue to long for that happy death of yesterday. The horror of it is that even now, when I have integrated the logical function, when it becomes evident that the function contains death hidden within it, still I long for it with my lips, my arms, my heart, with every millimeter...

The fatal dialectic accelerates at an increasingly made tempo and circumstances relentlessly hustle him to the edge of the abyss. He must choose. Scientists of the United State have developed a surgical cure for the spreading plague of "Fancy.” By submitting to the Operation he will be cleansed of the disease. D-503 begins to build dream-castles—the serenity that will be restored to him after the Operation—obliteration of all shadows—the last irritating wrinkle on the otherwise smooth plane of existence removed. It is for I-330 to point out to him the implications of his beatific vision. He is faced with two alternative forms of destruction. There is no escape route. She pulls him to her:

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Everything seemed to have disappeared save her sharp hot lips . . . “Goodby." "Why ... Why ‘goodby?’" "You have been ill, have you not? Because of me you have committed crimes. Hasn't all this tormented you? And now you have the Operation to look forward to. You will be cured of me. And that means—goodby." "No!" I cried. A pitiless sharp black triangle on a white background. “What? Do you mean that you don’t want happiness?” My head was breaking into pieces; two logical trains collided and crawled upon each other, rattling and smothering ... "Well, I am waiting. You must choose; the Operation and one-hundred-per-cent happiness, or ... ” "I cannot... without you ... I must now ... without you ...”

For D-503 the moment of truth has come. As he walks down the street—alone in a crowd of Numbers on their way to salvation, he mutters, “I do not want salvation ...” The question is, will he manage to summon the strength of will to support the decision he wishes to make? But D-503 is doomed. Once again he cannot proceed beyond the point of noble intentions. His aspirations are elevated, but the stakes set by 1-330 are too high. He throws in his cards. During the chaos of the last revolt he rushes to 1-330’s apartment and finds the floor strewn with discarded pink checks—almost all of them made out in his name. But there is one other—a mysterious F number. Shaking and trembling, he returns to his own quarters and finds 1-330 waiting for him—calmly smoking an illegal cigarette. He begins to babble incoherently. 1-330 exudes the dignity of eternity. “Be silent. Don’t you see it matters very little? I came anyway. They are waiting for me below. Do you want these minutes which are our last... ?” After the passionate embrace that follows, 1-330 comments quietly, “They say you went to see the Well-Doer yesterday; is it true?” He does not lie and 1-330’s eyes widen with delight. He has not failed her. But then her face loses color as she contemplates the consequences. He describes the interview in full, but omits the Well-Doer’s contention that he has only been used. The strain, however, is too great for him. He recalls the pink checks. D-503 must live with Certainty. He can contain himself no longer and stupidly or compulsively he asks the lethal question, “Did you come to see me because you wanted to inquire ...” 1-330 regards him mockingly. She becomes ice. Even after she has gone, D-503 must continue to feed his dessicated academic mind dry bones. In a public rest-room he encounters a crank who has calculated that there is no infinity.

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Owen Ulph "If the universe is infinite, then the average density of matter must equal zero; but since we know it is not zero, therefore the universe is finite; it is spherical in form, and the square of its radius—R2—is equal to the average density multiplied by . . . The only thing left is to calculate the numerical coefficient and then ... Do you realize what it means? It means that everything is final, everything is simple . . . But you, my honored sir, you disturb me, you prevent my finishing my calculations by your yelling!”

D-503 is, indeed, yelling. He is absolved! 1-330 was wrong. But then the final recoil of the diabolical dialectic. D-503 grips the mathematical zealot by the lapels, "There, where your finite universe ends, what is there? What?” Drained of all further will to resist the claim of his gloriously inglo­ rious destiny, D-503 allows himself to be escorted to the Operating Auditorium and permits his soul to be removed. Simultaneously he returns to the Garden of Eden, re-enters the Womb, is united with the Divine Logos and receives the Supreme Grace of Unblemished Happi­ ness from the Immaculate United State. He reveals all he knows of the Underground. In the evening 1-330 is brought in. She refuses to testify. Smiling within the translucent casing of the Great Bell, she remains silent and defiant. Three times she is deprived of consciousness and three times resuscitated, but she utters no word. Thus she chooses annihilation in preference to submission while D-503, imbecilically transported, looks on—patriotically deploring her dishonesty and hypocrisy. His final words are, “Reason must prevail.” If this is irony, it is not the irony of D-503, for we must conclude that a sense of the ironic is a taint on Man’s perfection which must have been expunged along with his soul in the course of the Great Operation. With Zamyatin’s multi-visioned conclusion, the anomalous blend­ ing of the sexual and the political leaves the reader in a state of baffled consternation. Reason does, indeed, prevail in its triumph over the subversive nature of personal love—the theme developed more expli­ citly and with less subtlety in Orwell’s 1984. Romanticism, rooted in the emotions, goes down to defeat with the implacable and irrevocable extermination of I-330. The Absolute Collective is victorious. The Individual, even reduced to the level of Arthur Koestler’s “grammatical fiction,” is exterminated—and "the love which demands all or nothing” gets nothing. The "absurd, incurable, beautiful disease” to which D-503 almost succumbed, is extirpated with unconditional finality. Was l-330's act of willful acceptance of extinction a futile gesture? Whatever answer is given to this rhetorical question, I-330 is a monumental creation. She is a contemporary Prometheus who failed. Yet her failure is more magnificent than any conceivable success. She

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emerges as the quintessence of Dignity, Stature and Nobility. She is the incarnation of Divine Disdain. This sublimely defiant female Satan can­ not simply be slung from Heaven; because as long as She exists anywhere, Omnipotence will be confronted by Contempt. She must be obliterated. The new gods have learned from the blunders of the old. I-330 is a glowing tribute to womanhood. But it took a male mind to conceive her—and since all great romantics are narcissists . . . Well.. . it is clear that the true sex of the Devil requires further research.

Notes 1. Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884-1937): Russian mathematician, naval architect, critic and novelist. Died in Paris after seven years of voluntary exile from the Soviet Union. See Living Age, Vol. CCCXLIII, Oct., 1932, 160-163. 2. RAPP: Stalinist organization for the “seizure of power in literature." See Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform—A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York, 1934). 3. Zamiatin, Autobiography, 1922 ed., 43. 4. Zamiatin, “Skifi li?", Mysl, No. 1, 286. 5. Zamiatin, “L. Andreev," Litsa, 53. 6. Zamiatin, “Defense of the Serapion Brothers," Novaia russkaia proza. Russkoe Iskusstvo, Nos. 2-3 (1923), 58-59. 7. Quotations from Zamyatin's novel We will not be cited. The translation used was that of Gregory Zilboorg, Dutton Paperback ed. (New York, 1952). 8. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, New Directions (New York, 1951), 260. 9. J. K. Huysmans, “Preface to 1903 Edition,” Against the Grain (New York, 1931), 73. 10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” Complete Poetic­ al Works, Cambridge ed. (Boston and New York), 369. 11. Charles Baudelaire, “Hymne à la Beauté,” Les Fleurs du Mal, C. F. MacIntyre edition (Berkeley, 1947), 54. 12. Alex M. Shane, Evgenij Zamjatin; a Critical Study, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept, of Slavic Languages and Literature (U. of C. Berkeley, 1965), 185. 13. Zamiatin, "Fedor Sologub," Litsa, 37.

AESTHETICS

NOTES ON THE IMAGERY IN ZAMYATIN’S WE Carl R. Proffer

The modernistic imagery used in Zamyatin’s We often seems senseless and chaotic. The diarist, D-503, undergoes a mental crisis while he is keeping his record; from a narrative point of view his own inner turmoil justifies, to a large extent, the disconnected nature of the diary entries and the rapidly shifting focus of attention within each entry. Because he has been educated in the Single State, his ability to de­ scribe his personal life clearly and methodically has never developed; he can think only in terms of straight lines, uncomplicated geometrical figures, and mathematical formulae.1 This does not suffice for treating the new and strange mental events which overpower him, and for this reason his record often becomes chaotic, almost incoherent. He falls in love, is introduced to life beyond the Green Wall, and is drawn into a revolutionary plot; all this is too much for him to endure without confusion, especially since he is trying to resist all these new influences. Many strange images appear in his diary, images which seem to be senseless products of his own agitation and confusion: yellow dres­ ses jump into his mind, water drips on a stone, sap pours from a brass Buddha, fiery golden suns blind him, beasts’ eyes stare at him, the eyelids of I-330 become curtains, secrets seem to hide in the opaque dwelling of the head, under its crust the earth seems to be on fire, fires leap up behind l-330’s eyes. These and other images recur constantly, seemingly with no pattern and no meaning.. Yet in all the apparent chaos, these images do fall into a coherent pattern and have important bearing on the theme of the novel. We will examine in particular the use of the color yellow (applied to numerous objects) and the image of a fire encased in a cold shell. This study will explain the function of these images in the novel.

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Zamyatin’s novel attacks the proposition that man knows what is best for himself, that man always chooses the course of action which is most advantageous to himself, that he can rationally organize life and thereby win perfect happiness.2 In We the irrational faculty in man is termed “fancy," and in the end the scientists of the Single State discov­ er the one infallible, irrevocable way to make men happy—an operation which excises fancy. That part of the human brain which, according to the leaders, does not function in man's own best interests, that which is not explainable, predictable, and logical, that which does not serve the interests of society as a whole is removed. “Fancy” is concealed deep in the human mind, and Zamyatin con­ siders this faculty essential for free, meaningful, complete human life. That which is hidden in the mind is alive and vital; it is the golden stuff, the golden sap of life; it is formless, hot, irrational—but it is the basis of life. The imagery used by Zamyatin in We reflects his conception of the struggle between the cold, logical outer forms limiting life (the new society with its restraints and controls) and the seething inner life of each human being. Accordingly, the novel’s basic image, recurring in various forms, is the image of a cold outer shell (form, logicality, predictability) covering a hot, seething inner core (formlessness, irrationality, unpredictability). This image is used on different levels. In the following passage it is first applied to the entire earth, then to man in particular: .. . we, on earth, are constantly walking over a seething blood-red sea of fire which is hidden there in the womb of the earth. But we never think about this. And suppose that this thin shell beneath our feet were suddenly to turn to glass, that suddenly we would catch sight of... I became glass. I saw within myself. There were two "I’s.” One was my former self, D-503, number D-503, but the other ... Up to now he had only stuck his shaggy paws a little out of the shell, but now he was crawling out altogether, the shell was cracking .. . and what then?3

Images similar to this one, representing man’s body as a shell conceal­ ing irrational energies, usually symbolized by fire, appear again and again; At that moment I saw only her eyes. An idea came to me: isn't man constructed just as primitively as those absurd "apartments"—human heads are opaque, and there are only two very small windows leading inside: the eyes. She seemed to have

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guessed—and turned around. "Well, here are my eyes. Well?” (This, of course, without saying a word.) Before we were two sinister dark windows, and, within, such an unknown, alien life. I saw only fire; some “fireplace" of her own blazing . .. (p. 27.)

She went up to the statue of the snub-nosed poet and, having lowered the curtains on the wild fire of her eyes—there, inside, behind the windows ... (p. 28). Then she lifted the curtain—and raised her eyes: through the dark windows a fire was blazing (p. 29).

Related images are applied to other characters: And his eyes sparkled—two sharp little drills, twisting rapidly, drilling deeper and deeper, and now, at any moment, would bore to the very bottom, would see what I do not even dare admit to myself... (p. 33). For a long time we looked into each other’s eyes—those shafts leading from the superficial world to another world which is beneath the surface (p. 81).

When D-503 is in love (an irrational emotional manifestation for which, to use D-503’s terms, there is no formula), he moves inside l-330’s eyes, into the fire which is symbolic of passion and, more importantly, of freedom in general: " 'I knew you would be here, that you would come. I knew thou, thou . . . ’ The spears of her eyelashes move aside, they let mein...” (p. 131.) Logic and rationality seek to rule the new world, but they can never destroy the inner irrational world of each man: “I am like a motor set in motion at too many revolutions per minute: the bearings have become too hot, in another minute, the mol­ ten metal will begin to drip, and everything will turn to nothing. Quick—some cold water, some logic. I pour on bucketsful, but logic sizzles on the hot bearings and spreads through the air in an intangible white vapor.” (p. 116.) Here the image is quite clear: the cold shell of logic encasing blazing energies and passions. Logic keeps the form hard and compact, but irrationality (human feelings and emotions) melts the metal, transforming it into a formless molten mass. With the removal of fancy this irrational human spirit, this inner fire of life is quenched. But Zamyatin believes that the human mind and body must struggle free from the cold artificial shell of logic in which they are imprisoned by such a society. There can be no freedom for a man when he is thus immured, shielded from life by uniforms, glass, habit, and strict regimentation.

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Zamyatin uses the color yellow for objects symbolic of man’s strug­ gle for freedom, objects associated with man’s efforts to crack the walls of hard logical shells and escape from the limitations of rationality to a complete life—to the burning, life-giving golden sun. D-503’s discovery of his second self is actuated by his passion for 1-330. She has already rebelled against the controls of the Single State and cast the chains from her mind. She now impells D-503 to insurrection, to obey his instincts instead of his logic. Significantly, yel­ low is her color; it is repeatedly associated with her and connected to the above-noted image of fire leaping behind the eyes, deep in the human mind. She draws D-503 into her eyes, into the chaotic world of the illogical and the unpredictable: "Do you realize that all that is certain has come to an end? Now things will be new, improbable, unforeseen.” . . . She slowly drew me into herself through the narrow golden windows of her pupils. Thus it was for a long time, in silence. And for some reason I recalled how one day I had watched some incomprehensible yellow pupils through the Green Wall; and over the Wall birds were soaring .. . 4 (p. 126.)

Her eyes and the color yellow are connected with the old irrational world, the museum, the seething life outside the Wall, in particular the free birds flying above the imprisoning Wall. When I-330 is in the old ‘‘illogical" world she removes the standard blue uniform; in the museum, “She was dressed in a short, bright-yellow dress ...” (p. 28.) In this yellow dress she draws D-503 into the realms of irrationality and sunlight. In D-503’s first dream (an irrational event which frightens him considerably), the color yellow predominates, the yellow of l-330’s dress, and, especially, the yellow brass statue of Buddha (a non-rational philosopher and teacher of the ancient illogical world). For Zamyatin gold becomes the color of life itself. The sap of life flows richly from the serene Buddha: “ . . . a dress, yellow as an orange. Then—a brass Buddha; suddenly it lifted the brass eyelids—and sap began to flow—from the Buddha. And from the yellow dress—sap, and on the mirror drops of sap, and the large bed oozes sap, and the children’s cribs, and now I myself..." (p. 31.) Again Zamyatin creates the image of a life-substance (which is basically free and non-rational) flowing formlessly from a cold shell. D-503 considers this a sickness; he is still a slave of the Single State and fears freedom: “The dream— yellow—Buddha ... It immediately became clear to me that I should go

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to the Medical Bureau.” (p. 35.) Yellow is identified as the color of life and freedom by being mentioned together with Buddha and then with flowers in a seemingly disconnected series of images: "My head was spinning; within a dynamo hummed. Buddha—yellow—lilies of the val­ ley .. . ” (p. 47.) Of course, the flowers are symbolic of the freedom existing only beyond the Wall. Uncontrolled sexuality (non-rational, the basic unbounded instinct of the man-animal), is continually associated with the color yellow—again through 1-330. The first time she and D-503 make love: "I turned around. She was in a light, saffron-yellow dress of ancient style. This was a thousand times more evil than if she had been completely unclothed. Two sharp points, glowing with a rosy color through the thin cloth—two hot coals through the ashes.” (p. 49.) She has purposely changed from her unit into the yellow dress before seducing him. Note again the image of the internal fire, in this particular case associated with sexuality. The saffron-yellow color is stressed again: ... she stood up and, glowing rosily through the saffron tissue, took a few steps, and, stopping behind my chair... Suddenly her arm was around my neck, her lips plunged into my lips ... no, somewhere still deeper, still more terrifying ... (p. 51.)

Thus the color yellow, passion and freedom are related to each other. And when he makes love to her later, he recalls the dream, the Buddha, and the yellow color: it seems to him that all is saturated with a golden sap, the original stuff of life. It is formless and irrational, as are his actions at this point in the novel: The room in half-dusk, blue, saffron-yellow, dark green morocco leather, the golden smile of Buddha, the gleam of mirrors. And—my old dream, now so comprehensible: everything was saturated with a golden-roseate sap, in a second it would pour over the brim, splash out— It ripened ... there was no pink coupon, there was no accounting, there was no Single State, there was no me. There were only the golden eyes opened widely to me; and through them I slowly entered within—deeper and deeper. And silence . .. (p. 66.)

His revolt against the State, against being a logical cog in a logical machine, against the sacrifice of his own ego and desires is at its peak; he has the audacity to say that he is the Universe. He proclaims his freedom. This desire for freedom is irrational, but it is human and is here associated with sexuality. Again we see the golden sap of life, the golden statue of Buddha emitting life from inside its shell of brass.

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The life-giving sun is also golden. Outside the Wall sunlight is unfiltered, uncorrupted, full of life: And if you too were sometime as sick as I am now, you know what kind of sun is—what kind of sun there can be—in the morning; you know this rosy, lucid, warm gold. And the air itself is faintly roseate, and everything is alive: the stones are soft and alive; iron is warm and alive; people are alive and every one of them is smiling. It can happen that within an hour everything will disappear—the rosy blood will drain off drop by drop—but in the meantime everything is alive, (p. 72.)

The sun is the blood of all life; like the golden sap of the Buddha or the melting metal of the brain it is a formless liquid. Real sunshine is wild and searing, unlike the dull, de-vivified sunlight which pierces the glass of the logical Wall: “And then, slowly, the sun. Not ours, not that bluish-crystalline sun uniformly distributed through the glass bricks—no: a wild, soaring, scorching sun, tearing everything from you, ripping everything into small bits.” (p. 19.) When D-503 goes beyond the Green Wall for the first time one of the things which agitates him most strongly is the vitality and ferocity of sunlight not diffused by glass: “The sun ... it was not our sun evenly distributed across the mirror surface of the pavements: this sun was made of some kind of living splinters, incessantly jumping spots which blinded the eyes, put the head in a spin.” (p. 132.) Even before D-503 learned so much about life outside the Wall, in the spring there were evidences of it: "Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from wild, unseen plains, wind brings the yellow honeyed pollen of some kind of flowers. The lips dry up from this sweet pollen—you continually run your tongue over them, and, probably, the women you meet also have sweet lips (and men too, of course). To some extent this hinders logical thinking.” (p. 67.) The pollen is a symbol of freedom and natural vitality; and it is associated with the color yellow, as well as with women (subdued sensuality here) and with the absence of rational thinking. Later D-503 notes that the fragrance I-330 leaves behind her in his room is "like the sweet, dry, yellow dust of flowers beyond the Green Wall” (p. 116). Life outside the Wall, outside the shell, is associated with this color in numerous other instances: Foggily, dully, the blunt snout of some kind of beast was visible to me through the glass; its yellow eyes were constantly repeating the same thought which was in­ comprehensible to me. For a long time we looked into each other's eyes—those shafts leading from the superficial world to another world which is beneath the surface. And a thought stirred within me: "What if, suddenly, he, the yellow-eyed

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one, in his absurd dirty heap of leaves, in his uncalculated life, is happier than we are?" (p. 81.)

The same chain of associations is seen in this passage: yellow, life outside the shell-Wall, freedom, absence of logical calculations. When I-330 stands outside the Wall, in the sunlight, D-503 notes: “And then, with my body rumpled, happy, crumpled as if after the embraces of love, I was below . . . The sun, voices above—the smile of I-. A golden-haired woman, her whole body silky-golden, redolent of grasses. In her hands—a chalice, apparently of wood. She drinks some with red lips—and gives the cup to me, and I close my eyes and drink eagerly in order to quench the fire within me—I drink sweet, prickly, cold sparks.” (p. 135.) Again Zamyatin uses the image of fire within the human body. In addition, the sunlight is associated with the free, wild, natural life—life not encased in a frigid glass coffin. The freedom of being in the sunlight has the same effect on him as the embraces of love. These examples do not begin to exhaust Zamjatin’s use of these images and patterns. For example, when 0-90 is pregnant, ripe with life: Her entire body was strangely, perfectly, and resiliently rounded. Her arms and the chalices of her breasts, and all her body which I knew so well was rounded out and stretched her unit taut: there, at any moment, the thin material would be torn—and everything would be outside, in the sun, in the light. It seems to me that there in the green debris, in the spring, the sprouts just as stubbornly tear their way through the earth in order as quickly as possible to put forth branches, leaves and, as quickly as possible, to burst into bloom, (p. 146.)

In this passage the author uses three images presenting life throbbing under the surface, trying to burst through to the life-giving sun: the first is her body itself striving to tear the cloth, the second is the green shoot reaching through the earth to freedom in fruition, and the third is the unborn child within O-90’s softly rounded body awaiting its struggle to freedom.5 Just as the baby rests expectantly in the mother’s womb, so do all men wait in the womb of the Earth: ”... through the mist the sun sang—it was barely audible; everything was suffused with resilient pearl, gold, rose, red. The whole world is one unembraceable woman, and we are in her very womb; we have not yet been born, we are joyfully ripening. And it was clear to me, incontrovertibly clear; every­ thing existed only for me: the sun, the mist, the rose, the gold—for me.” (p. 64.) Here Zamyatin uses all of the elements we have been

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examining: the image of life within a casing, sexuality associated with life, freedom, and the golden vivifying sun. All the beings outside the Wall are associated with the sun, with the same golden color, the sap of life: “Naked, they went into the woods. There they learned from the trees, the beasts, the birds, the flowers, the sun. Hair grew over their bodies, but under the hair they preserved their warm red blood.” (p. 141.) The untamed sun can revivify even an old person, suffuse him with life and warmth: "... the old woman caressed the branch; on her knees—a yellow stripe from the sun. And for one instant I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, the yellow eyes—we were all one, we were firmly united by some kind of small veins, and through these small veins—one common, tempestuous, magnificent blood ...” (p. 82.) The red color of blood is often connected with the image of the sun as we have already seen. Later, when I-330 examines D-503’s hands, she tells him that he must have in him "some drops of the blood of the sun and the forest” (p. 140). Red is the color of the irrational fire of spirit within the body. When D-503 is outside the Wall with the people there, I-330 stands proudly erect with her golden body gleaming in the sunlight, and we are told of the image of the youth drawn on the rock: "I saw a crude picture ... a winged youth, transparent body, and there, where the heart should be—a blinding, red, smouldering coal" (p. 135).6 The wings are obviously symbolic of freedom (we recall the image of the birds earlier), as is the red coal itself, the fire within. D-503 feels the same vitality and passion within himself: “At my side—1-330; her smile . . . And within me—a hot coal, and this was instantaneous, light, a little painful, beauti­ ful .. . ” (p. 136.) Zamyatin hints here that freedom is beautiful, but that it is also a source of pain. When D-503 assumes the burdens of free­ dom even temporarily, it causes him to suffer.

IV

The control of fire is glorified in the metallic iambs of the Single State's poets. D-503 writes of the poetry which describes the harnes­ sing of fire: ... A fire. Houses swayed in the iambs, spurted liquid gold upward, collapsed. The green trees were scorched, sap dripped—already there remained only the black crosses of skeletons. But Prometheus appeared (this was, of course, we). "He harnessed fire to machine, to steel, And chained chaos with Law."

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Everything was new, steel: A steel sun, steel trees, steel people. Suddenly some insane man “freed fire from the chains,” and again everything was perishing • • • (P- 43.)

Here again is Zamyatin’s favorite imagery: the fire, yellow liquid, sap, steel shells. The numbers of the Single State view the releasing of fire as insanity; it must be contained by steel. Law and regularity must rule; logic and form render all things predictable. Just as the golden sun is replaced by a steel sun and the sap-filled trees by steel ones, so must man be turned to steel by controlling the fire within him. Zamyatin sees each free man as a repository for this fire of life. Men construct logical systems, but in life cold logicality always remains a superficial covering. A fire of irrational instincts, feelings, emotions burns in man, just as the yellow sun burns in the sky. The sources of the fire are different, but the nature of the fire is the same. The fire is the source of free life. Just as sunlight filtered by layers of protective glass supports only an atrophied kind of life, so man rigidly bound by rules and systems lives an incomplete life. When the fire of the instincts and emotions is extinguished, then human life ceases. This is what happens to D-503; in the end he undergoes the opera­ tion which removes “fancy.” Then he is completely content with regula­ tions and logic; the bluish light filtering through the glass brick seems the only kind of sunlight possible. The yellow pollen in the spring will no longer attract his attention. He will not be interested in the golden sap of life. When others who have had the operation look at him, he will not have to worry about seeing a fire burning behind their parted eyelids. He will no longer think of himself as a motor out of control; he will not have to shout for pailfuls of logic, because the metal of the brain will not be hot. The unpredictable fire has been extinguished.

V

Yellow is not the only color used symbolically in the novel. Some comments on the significance of the others are necessary. We have already seen that red is connected with the images of the sun, fire, heart, and blood. One important fact is that all the colors except blue are associated primarily with the irrational world of the past. D-503 writes that among the colors which are “stifling the logical course of thoughts” are the “reds, greens, bronze-yellows, whites, and oranges” (p. 148). For example, the color green is associated with the grasses and trees beyond the Wall; these are "illogical” and disgust D-503 at

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first. The Green Wall separates the numbers from this wild foliage. In the museum there is furniture covered with green leather, and there are old books with green bindings. Both the liquor which I-330 drinks and the revolutionary letters M E FI are "poisonously green." Several times D-503 refers to the red-brown mahogany bed in the museum; later Pil’njak was to make mahogany a symbol of the past. The color of the grand piano which is used in the Single State’s satire on the past is black. When she plays this piano I-330 wears a black dress. She wears a black hat and black stockings with her yellow dress when she seduces D-503. He repeatedly complains that he is covered with black stains (traces of irrationality) which are ineffaceable. The Single State’s announcement of the operation calls "fancy” a worm which eats “black wrinkles” in the forehead. The color of the Single State is blue. The uniforms are blue. D-503 refers to the icy blue rows of buildings, the grey-blue rows of numbers, the soft blue light which calms him, the crystalline-blue sunlight, and to the blue spark of electricity which the Guardians use to punish offenders. In one important case the color blue is associated with the non-rational world: O-90’s eyes are blue. She is repeatedly character­ ized by the rosy crescent of her lips and her "round, blue-crystalline eyes” (p. 12). The diarist notes that, like the sky over the Single State, they are clear and unclouded. When, on one occasion clouds do appear in the sky, D-503 notes a parallel—tears appear in her blue eyes. (For him neither clouds nor tears are logical.) The image of the eyes as secret corridors is applied to 0-90, just as it was to I-330: "... round blue eyes opened widely to me—blue windows to the inside—and I penetrate to there without being hindered ...” (p. 34). She too revolts against the Single State, but her revolt is a different kind than that of I-330. 0-90 has one simple desire: to feel the stirring of life within her. She wants to be pregnant, even though she realizes she will be executed when it is discovered. Unlike I-330 (who eventually saves 0-90) she has no raging fire within her; but, significantly, there are “tiny droplets of the sun in her blue eyes” (p. 39). The gold of the sun remains the most important color in the novel.

This, then, is the sense of part of the imagery used by Zamyatin in We. It shows that seemingly disconnected elements actually fit into a logical pattern. Taken as a coherent system of images they illustrate some of the central ideas of this novel against utopian rationality.

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Notes

1. The comparisons D-503 uses to explain various aspects of the old and new worlds and to describe characters are taken largely from geometry or the physical sciences. 2. The novel's connections with Dostoevskij, especially with the sullen hero of Notes from Underground, have been examined by R. L. Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature fs-Gravenhage, 1958). 3. E. Zamiatin, My (New York, 1952), pp. 51-52. All of the passages which are quoted here I translated myself using the text of the Chekhov Publishing House edition. Hereafter the page references to that edition are given in parenthesis following each quotation. I have striven to make the translations literal, while retaining something of the elliptical style and corresponding punctuation. 4. In this quotation, as in all those which follow, all italics are my own. 5. Renewal of life, the blooming flower (breaking of the outer shell) is commented upon elsewhere by D-503. He writes, "... I am ill, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But is blooming not a sickness? Is it not painful when a bud bursts? Don’t you think that the spermatozoid is the most terrifying of microbes?” (p. 133.) 6. One might speculate that this image is borrowed from a similar one in Pushkin’s Prorok. Pushkin’s bust is in the museum of the Single State, and it is mentioned more than once. In addition, R-13, the rebel poet of the Single State, is repeatedly character­ ized by his "Negroid lips," a detail one would associate with Pushkin because of his much-discussed Abyssinian ancestry.

THE EYE IN WE Ray Parrott

I—my eyes . . . D-503

Numerous scholars and critics have noted that nearly all of Zamyatin's fictions turn on their imagery.1 Edward J. Brown, for example, remarks that most of his characters are "identified by the device of the repeated metaphor . .. They are repeatedly associated with objects that typify them for the reader."2 Alex Shane also has written that the repetition of images is crucial to Zamyatin’s technique of characterization; in fact, realized metaphors, sprung similes, as well as the recurrent, fixed image and its associations are the writer’s basic means of characterization. Having selected some "particular physical characteristic . . . which best reveals . . . character or some basic aspect of it,” Zamyatin then almost exclusively focuses upon this char­ acteristic or correlative associations in developing character.3 No better demonstration of this technique could be adduced than the anti-utopian novel We. Zamyatin, of course, employs a variety of physical features in por­ traying nearly all of the major and minor characters in We. All of us vividly recall the arresting images of O-90’s rosy roundness, her rosy mouth and saucer-like, vacuous blue eyes; S-4711’s body formed in a double curve like that of the letter "S," his pink wing-ears, and his gimlet eyes; R-13’s smacking, spraying Negroid lips; l-330’s smile-bite with sharp, white teeth and her triangulated brows; D-503’s shaggy, atavistic hands; the old crone’s wrinkled, overgrown mouth; and the doctor’s scissor-lips, to mention only a few of Zamyatin’s recurrent, characteriz­ ing image-metaphors. These image-metaphors are the salient feature of the writer’s synecdochical style of characterization, the technique of pars pro toto, wherein an important part of the whole signifies the whole and usually is the part most directly associated with the subject in question.4 Or, as D-503 characterizes his own style: "This was my way of thinking: from the part to the whole.’’5 Interestingly, Zamyatin’s predilection for this synecdochical style of

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characterization is most consistently evidenced and developed in We through the individual, physical features of sensory reception and response: eyes, ear, noses, lips, hands, and the like. This paper is devoted to an analysis and demonstration of this style of characterization, and in particular of the multi-faceted use and meaning of the novel’s dominant functional metaphor, the eye, or the eye-symbol.6 I shall include in my analysis not only the eye or eyes per se, but all the external, contiguous physical features of the eye such as the eyelids, the eyelashes, and the eyebrows. For it is through this total metaphor-image of the eye that its various emotive and referential qual­ ities are expressed. I have encountered more than 160 specific references to the eye-symbol in We. In a novel of approximately 200 pages in length, the sheer cumulative bulk of the recurrent eye-symbol tends to support my contention that it is Zamyatin’s major device of characterization. Characters’ eyes provide the central clues to their personalities, in addition to their thematic functions in We; a point which has largely escaped scholarly attention to date.7 From a strictly physiological point of view the eyes are perhaps the human being's most expressive receivers and senders of direct sense impressions. Traditional symbolism in turn expresses the central im­ portance and function of the eye through its likeness to the sun; the representation of the sun as an eye, for example, is basic to the legendes des origines. The eye, like the sun, is a source of light; light itself is symbolic of intelligence and the spirit. Thus, the act of seeing represents a spiritual act and symbolizes the capacity of the mind to understand as well as to evaluate.8 The eye embodies and expresses the “Self,” it becomes a metaphor of the Self. Consequently, when D-503 confronts the irrational world beyond the Wall, his eyes cannot stand the glare, just as R-13 had predicted; at this point in the novel D-503 is incapable of comprehending the irrational world, the irrational element in his self. In We the eye or eyes function as metonymical references of the Self, or various Selves. The eye-symbol is used not only to characterize all the novel’s major and most secondary figures, occasionally it is employed as a metaphor-image of the Self even to the point of replac­ ing pronouns and numerical designations of character. Moreover, eyes in the novel are metaphorical "corridors” to the inner Self, or Selves; “corridors” which serve to reveal, guard, or conceal the inner Self as occasion warrants and which, when closed, provide the Self with a means of escape from the rational strictures and encroachments of the Only State. Eyes are also, as it were, a vantage point for the inner Self

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and at the same time a projection of this Self. Occasionally they serve to mirror other Selves; frequently they are employed to reflect the sun, thereby strengthening this analogic association. In addition to the re­ ferential value suggested by the image of inner fire seen in characters’ eyes, and symbolic of the human desire for passion, the irrational, and individual freedom, Zamyatin employs the eye-symbol to reflect emo­ tional states in his characters.9 Open and closed eyes also signal states of wakefulness and reverie in narrative dream-sequences, conscious­ ness and unconsciousness; they also signal D-503’s spatial and temporal, psychological and ideational movement between the rational and irrational worlds via the nebulous tunnel-corridor. And it is signifi­ cant that Zamyatin extends his use of the eye-symbol to inanimate objects and animals as well as to the human figures in We. As “corridors" to the inner Self, eyes are the direct means by which the real selves of the rebellious citizenry of the Only State are revealed. Behind the cold exterior of logic, order, and rationality superimposed by the Only State lurks the real apartment of the 29th-century citizen. This is aptly illustrated in the passage where D-503 draws an analogy be­ tween the House of Antiquity and l-330's eyes: We stopped in front of a mirror. At that moment I saw only her eyes. An idea came to me: the human being is constructed just as ridiculously as these absurd “apartments"—human heads are opaque, and there are only two tiny windows: the eyes. .. . (27)

Later, when D-503 searches l-330’s eyes in an effort to comprehend her true nature, Zamyatin reinforces the suggestion of an unknown inner-being through the device of the recurrent eye-symbol. This inner Self, accessible only through the eyes, is a repository and fortress of the real, irrational world; the world of ideas, feelings and emotions which comprise the whole, individual being: Before me were two terrifyingly-dark windows, and inside such a strange, unknown life. I saw only a fire—some peculiar “fireplace" was burning there.. .. (27)

. . . Through the dark windows of her eyes—there, within her, I saw a flaming oven, sparks, tongues of fire leaping upwards, mountains of dry, resinous wood heaped up. . . . (140)

There soon will appear from somewhere the sharp mocking angle of brows lifted to the temples, and the dark window eyes, and there, within, a flaming fireplace. ... (76)

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In this dualistic conception and nature of character the body is but a "cold shell of logic encasing blazing energies and passions.”10 This notion of the real, irrational Self existing as a separate entity within an impassive, rational exterior shell is most succinctly and explicitly illus­ trated when D-503 recounts his long silent appraisal of the beast beyond the wall: We looked into each other's eyes for a long time—into those shafts from the superficial world into another world beneath the surface. (81)

The use of the eye-symbol as a corridor into the inner self is implicit in all the foregoing. However, Zamyatin makes the image explicit when D-503 refers to O-90’s eyes as a means of access to her inner being: "... round blue eyes opened toward me widely—blue windows leading inside ...” (34). This same device and suggestion is extended to l-330’s eyes in a similar if more vivid vein: “But midway I stumbled against the sharp, motionless spears of her eyelashes, and I stopped” (190). And then extending or realizing the metaphor: "The spears of her eyelashes moved apart, permitted me inside ...” (131). It should be stressed that these passages represent only a fractional portion of the instances and related images employed by Zamyatin wherein the eye-symbol serves as the point and metaphor of direct access to the real, inner Self. I mentioned earlier that the eye in We serves as a vantage point for the inner Self, and, I might note, as an almost periscopic perspective. The prime example of this device occurs in the portrayal of the Letter Messenger, whose face is likened to an overhang or a refuge beneath which his rebellious inner-Self is hiding. We read D-503’s impressionis­ tic characterizations: "Here is a letter from her, for you." (From under the awning of that forehead) . . . From under the forehead, from under the awning .. . (94) ... hair low over the forehead, eyes gazing from under his brows—that same man.. . . (169)

... that same flattened man with the forehead low over his eyes, who several times had brought me notes from I. (142)

And then, suggesting the eyes’ contiguous relation with the covert voice of the inner-Self: "Before me stood a slovenly, slantingly lowered fore­ head ... a very strange impression: it seemed as if he spoke from there, from the eyes beneath his brows” (94). It is noteworthy that

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Zamyatin extends this metaphor of overhanging brows with but slight changes to several of the novel's characters. To D-503: "Shrunk into a ball, hidden beneath the awning of my forehead, I somehow from be­ neath my brows stealthily watched ...” (142). To R-13: “R sucked in his lips, looked at me from under his brows” (57). And finally the author applies the inner-voice—inner-Self parallel to I-330: “Her voice came from there, from inside, from behind the dark window eyes, where the fireplace was blazing” (28). The irrational nature of the inner-Self is necessarily concealed be­ neath the graphic image of the overhanging brows; yet the inner voices of the rebellious citizens express their fundamental convictions. And when the propitious moment for “self-revelation finally presents itself, the Letter Messenger is the first to extricate himself from his constricting, external shell as he joyously exclaims; “Aha-a" and the triumphant back of the neck turned; I caught sight of that man with the protruding forehead. But now all that remained in him of his former self was a name alone, so to speak; he had somehow crawled out from under his overhang­ ing forehead, and on his face about the eyes and lips rays were sprouting like tufts of hair; he was smiling. "Do you understand?" he shouted to me through the noise of the wind and the wings and the cawing. "Do you understand? The Wall! They have blown up the Wall! Do you un-der-stand?" (187)

Eyes also serve as a means of escape in We; as a means of shutting out external reality; as a means of veiling one's true feelings and convictions, whether of a personal (emotional) or ideological nature. 0-90, confronted by D-503’s rejection of her in favor of I-330, by his unwillingness to impregnate her and the chill sterility of his eventual advances, reacts typically and plausibly by closing her eyes to the situation: . . . her blue eyes were closed. . . . (69) O raised her face from the pillow and without opening her eyes she said, "Go away." (69) Her eyes were closed as if the sun were shining straight into her face. (98)

This same metaphor is extended to I-330. As the major symbol of the rebellious inner-Self struggling against the conditioned-thought proces­ ses of the Only State, it is only natural that l-330’s eye-symbol figures most prominently in the novel. Indeed, Zamyatin invests her figure with a striking, unique, and recurring image when he represents her eyelids

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as “blinds” which conceal her real Self at her discretion and inclination. And while these “blinds” obviously serve a sensual function in her portrayal, they more importantly serve to veil the irrational forces of her inner emotions and thoughts. She looked somewhere, down; her eyes were closed like blinds. I suddenly recalled: evening, about twenty-two; you walk along the avenue and among the brightly lighted, transparent cubicles are dark spaces with lowered blinds, and there, behind the blinds . . . What has she there behind her blinds? (26)

. . . again the lowered blinds of her eyes . . . There behind the blinds, something was going on in her, I didn't know what, but something that made me lose my patience. . . . (27)

Again she lowered her eyes to the letter. What had she there, behind her lowered blinds? What would she say? What would she do in a second? How to learn it? How to calculate it, when she comes entirely from there, from the wild, ancient land of dreams. (48)

When I-330 is apprehensive over D-503's visit to the Benefactor, Zamyatin reverses the psychic image of closed eyes: She said (without opening her eyes—I noticed this), "They say you went to see the Benefactor yesterday; is it true?” “Yes, it's true.” And then her eyes opened widely and with delight I looked at her and saw that her face quickly paled, effaced itself, and disappeared: only the eyes remained. (192)

When D-503 consciously seeks to avoid the reality of an undesirable situation he, too, repeatedly withdraws into himself and prevents the full impact of the situation from reaching his inner Self by simply dropping his eyelids: "... and I merely close my eyes to avoid seeing the date on which her name, the name 0-90, is written on my Sexual Table” (90). Subsequently, in tacit acknowledgement of the conflict between the rational and irrational aspects of his personality, D-503 attempts to escape from l-330's penetrating and provocative gaze, to retreat from perplexity: “I locked myself into myself as though into an ancient, opa­ que house; I blocked up the door with rocks, I lowered the window blinds ...” (174) In an interesting variant of this act of escaping, D-503 opens his eyes at the height of a fearful dream-sequence. The dual aspects of his personality have again been struggling for possession of his Self, and on this occasion his irrational impulses threaten to overcome his rational, Only-State conditioning: “ . . . and for me that was something

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terrible in this that I could not bear. I screamed, and again opened my eyes” (87). Generally speaking, however, the opening and closing of D-503’s eyes in dream-sequences simply signal the onset and conclu­ sion of his reveries. It is noteworthy that D-503’s nascent guilt-feelings are constantly expressed through the synecdochical image of his lowered eyes, as he cannot bring himself to face his betrayed Only-State comrades and society. Not only is this image psychologically plausible, it is stylistically consistent with Zamyatin’s overall use of the eye-symbol: I was shamefully saving myself by flight. I did not have the strength to raise my eyes . .. There was no place for me here, a criminal, a tainted man .. . (73-74) I could not raise my eyes. (77)

But I could not raise my eyes. (77) ... and I was afraid to raise my eyes. (182)

As this guilt becomes more manifest and complex, D-503 attempts to suppress his increasingly irrational thoughts and acts by consciously reasserting his mathematico-geometrical, Only-State conditioning as a defense mechanism: Quick to the newspaper! Perhaps there.... I read the paper with my eyes (exactly: my eyes are now like a pen, or like a calculator which you hold and feel in your hands; it is foreign, an instrument). (166)

And finally, standing before the mirror in his apartment, D-503 acknow­ ledges to himself that heretofore he had been completely unaware of the latent individualism awaiting release from his inner Self: “Steel-gray eyes encircled by the shadow of a sleepless night. And behind that steel—it turns out that I never knew before what was there” (54). The emotive property of the eye often serves as a concise indicator of a character’s state of mind in We. This is perhaps best illustrated in the extended passage where R-13’s eyes express the entire cycle of his feelings during a lengthy discussion with D-503 over the question­ able concepts of the Only State: . . . black eyes varnished with laughter. . . . (37)

... the varnish disappeared from his eyes. (40)

Suddenly I see R's eyes becoming more and more opaque. (55)

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And finally, when R-13 returns reassured to the confident end of his cycle: “ ... his eyes became covered with the varnish of laughter. . . . ” (55). This same device is extended to S-4711 when he happens to read D-503’s incautious diary entries, revealing the latter’s perplexed, inter­ nal vacillation. The clever, extremely graphic image is wholly repre­ sentative of the vivid, often bizarre, quality of much of Zamyatin's imagery: "... and I saw how a smile jumped out of his eyes, scam­ pered down his face, and, slightly wagging its tail, perched on the right corner of his mouth ..." (144). This graphic quality is again evidenced in 9-Controller’s eyes as she hesitatingly, lovingly appeals for D-503’s affection: ... through the bashful jalousies of lowered eyes—a tender, blinding, envelop­ ing smile. (91) And finally, through the bashful jalousies, very quietly ... (91)

Amazement is expressed through the eyes of 0-90 and U-Controller, respectively, through a considerably more conventional image: O amazedly, roundly, bluely looks at me . . . (163)

She raised her body on her elbow, her breasts splayed out to one side, eyes round; she had become wholly waxen. (181)

Regardless of D-503’s efforts to maintain a calm, outwardly rational appearance, his eyebrows belie his true psychological state as he stands before a mirror. They reflect the visible traces of his internal conflict as he struggles to retain control over his latent individualism: I look at myself—at him. And I know surely that he—with his straight brows—is a stranger, alien to me ... (54)

... from the armchair I saw only my forehead and eyebrows. And then I, the real I, saw in the mirror a distorted, quivering line of brow . .. (57) In the mirror for a second my distorted, broken eyebrows. (94)

For an instant in the mirror—the broken, quivering line of my brows. (138)

Personality traits are implicit in the leitmotif of O-90’s vacuity. She is essentially devoid of substance, and her vacuous nature is the pre­ vailing note conveyed by her characterizing images, and specifically her eye-symbol:

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. . . three times I kissed her wonderful blue eyes, unmarred by a single cloud.

(12) . . . round blue eyes opened toward me widely . .. and I penetrate inside unhindered: there is nothing in there, that is, nothing foreign, nothing superfluous. (34) . . . and empty eyes, engulfing in their blue emptiness. (164)

The artistic figure of the eye-symbol is repeatedly applied to S-4711, the rebel Guardian. In keeping with his character, and supposed obligation, as a beneficent guardian of the Only State, his eyes are portrayed as tiny gimlets which enable him to penetrate D-503’s exter­ nal trappings of logic and rationality: And his eyes sparkled, two sharp little drills swiftly revolving; they drilled in deeper and deeper. It seemed that in a moment they would drill in to the very bottom and would see something that I do not even admit to myself ... (33)

The drills reached the bottom within me . .. (33) Without looking I felt his two gray steel-drill eyes bore quickly into me . . . (77)

Screwing up his eyes, he bored his little drills into me ... (104) S turned around. The little drills bored quickly into me to the bottom and found something there. (129)

The doctor's contemptuous attitude toward D-503, and probably his fellow citizens in general, is vividly suggested through his eye-symbol of impaling horns: ... he was tossing patients up with his eyes, as if on horns . . . (77) He picked up my thin doctor with his horn eyes, then picked me up. (79)

Practically nothing, or no one, escapes Zamyatin’s exploitation of the artistic device of the eye-symbol. Animate beings quite naturally occasion its fullest use, although it is significant that inanimate objects and animals also are characterized by the device. Perhaps the fore­ most example of this is the House of Antiquity: “The yellow . . . walls were watching me through their dark, square window-glasses, were watching ..." (104). Then, within the House of Antiquity, the device is applied to the Brass Buddha, animating his imperious gaze: “Then a brass Buddha. Suddenly it lifted its brass eyelids ...” (31). More often

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than not, as with the novel’s human characters, animals’ eyes are the only constant physical feature, if not the sole peculiarity, that Zamyatin focuses on in characterizing them for the reader. The portrayal of the beast and the bird on the other side of the Green Wall are prominent examples: Through the glass the blunt snout of some beast looked at me dully, dimly; its yellow eyes stubbornly repeating the same thought which remained incomprehensi­ ble to me ... (And a thought stirred in me:) "What if he, this yellow-eyed one (in his absurd dirty heap of leaves, in his incalculable life) is happier than we are? ... the yellow eyes blinked, backed away, and disappeared in the foliage. (81) ... and its round black eyes drilled themselves into me ... (136)

Even the novel’s very minor figures usually are characterized by a metaphorical or conventional reference to their eyes. At the Divine Service the condemned man standing before the dreaded Machine is represented as: “And only the eyes—thirsty, swallowing black eyes . . .” (42). The parade protestant mistakenly identified by D-503 as I-330 is portrayed as: "Before me a quivering, freckle-strewn face with rusty-red eyebrows ...” (109). The person beyond the Green Wall whom D-503 addresses when searching for the momentarily lost I-330: “Shaggy, austere eyebrows turned to me . . . and shaggily nodded over there toward the center ...” (134). The Old Crone at the entrance to the House of Antiquity: "... craft rays from yellow eyes probing their way into me, deeper and deeper...” (82). And, finally, the eyes of the Second Builder of the Integral are parenthetically analogized as little flowers: His face is like porcelain, painted with sweet blue and tender little pink flowers (eyes and lips) ... (130) The little blue flowers are stirring, bulging out. (131)

This catalog of the multi-faceted use and significance of the eye-symbol in the novel We would not be complete without mentioning the reinforcing diversity of the device as applied to a number of characters’ portrayals. For example, Zamyatin lends a clever turn to the device when he compares O-90’s eyes to a saucer, as previously noted: . .. little blue saucer-eyes filled to the brim. (96)

... I looked into her blue eyes, filled to the brim . .. (97)

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Ray Parrott Tiny blue saucers overflowing the brim; silent, rapid tears ran down her cheeks, rushing over the brim ... (97)

The same literary trick is extended to l-330’s brows, which are repe­ atedly characterized as forming a triangle: Coal-black, slender eyebrows quirked up toward the temples: an acute triangle, smile. (137) ... the mocking, acute triangle of brows . .. (149) Dark brows raised high to the temples, the sharp mocking triangle . . . (50)

And, lastly, when D-503’s eyes are transfixed upon U-Controller in the humorous “seduction” scene: "... holding her as firmly as ever on the leash with my eyes . .. ” (180). The role of the eye-symbol as thematic device has been implicit throughout my remarks to this point. And it would seem that the novelistic conflict between that free individuality essential to complete human expression and the thorough suppression of the inner Self demanded by the concept of total service to the Only State needs no elaboration. Yet, though an analysis of the novel's theme lies outside the scope of this paper, meaning is a necessary correlary of the eye-symbol in We. The foregoing has provided a relatively studied if indirect statement of this aspect of the novel. One final illustration should suffice to suggest the pervasiveness of the eye-symbol in this aspect of the novel as well as in characterization. An eyelash becomes the extended image of D-503’s irrational behavior intruding upon the heretofore precise, logic­ al regimen of his daily existence: Yes, now it is precisely like that: I feel some foreign body or other there, in my brain, like a very fine eyelash in the eye. One feels entirely oneself, but as for this eye with the eyelash in it—that’s something one cannot forget, not even for a second ... (31 ) And through the glass walls of my algebraic world that eyelash penetrated again—there was something unpleasant . .. (33)

Then, in a slight variation of this image: “But then, to be conscious of one’s self, to be aware of one’s individuality, is only to be like a cinder-irritated eye ...” (111). Characters, of course, serve as bearers of the novel’s message and, as such, the tone and nature of their portrayals leaves an indelible impression upon the development and expression of theme. In this

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sense, the eye-symbol serves the dominant function among the aggre­ gate of creative images which figure so prominently in We. As an artistic device, the eye-symbol contributes more to the total novel than any other physical, spiritual, or ideological image; an understanding of its recurrent and complementary functions contributes both to an appre­ ciation of Zamyatin’s synecdochical style and the novel itself.

Notes

1. This paper was first presented in abridged form at the April 24, 1976, Spring meeting of Wisconsin AATSEEL held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. 2. Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution (New York, 1963), 72. 3. Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley, 1968), 152-53. See also Milton Ehre, "Zamjatin’s Aesthetics,” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (Fall 1975), 291 and 293. 4. Hongor Oulanoff also has noted this distinctive feature of Zamjatin’s style: "He operates by means of synecdoche: some distinct quality, some individual trait or physical detail of appearance signal the whole personality of the character." See The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (The Hague, 1966), 117. 5. Evgenii Zamiatin, My (New York, 1952), 61. Hereafter all citations from this edition will be noted in brackets by page number in the body of the article. 6. "Cleanth Brooks uses the term 'functional metaphor' to describe the way in which the metaphor is able to have ‘referential’ and 'emotive' characteristics and to go beyond them and become a direct means in itself of representing a truth incommunicable by other means. Clearly when a metaphor performs this function, it is behaving as a symbol.” Quoted from Thrall, Hibbard and Holman's A Handbook to Literature (New York, 1960), 282. 7. Although Christopher Collins discusses the role and nature of imagery in We at great length, his references to the eye only suggest its function as a "window” to the inner self. See Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study (The Hague, 1973), 52-68. 8. See, for example, J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York, 1962), 95-96. 9. Carl R. Proffer, "Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin’s We,” Slavic and East Euro­ pean Journal, Vol. VII, No. 3 (Fall 1963), 269-78. 10. Ibid., 271.

ZAMYATIN’S STYLIZATION Gary Kern

One way to form a concept of Evgeny Zamyatin’s work is to deter­ mine first what is missing. Zamyatin did not write poetry (save Attila, a play in blank verse), big novels or narrative stories. Much of his work lacks the feeling of a definite time, place or people. Instead of “realistic” description, one finds the surrealistic: “days like amber rosaries: identical, transparent, yellow” (“The Miracle of Ash Wednesday”), a “glowing, unprecedented, icy sun” (“The Dragon”), “sleepy elephant-busses” (“Fisher of Men”), “six-storied stone ships” in the “raging-stone ocean of streets” (“Mamai”). Instead of events fixed at a definite moment in history, one often finds universal situations: a diary from the thirtieth century relating to today (We), a moss-covered forest which has seen ancient Rus and will see winged men (“Rus”), the simultaneous, related experiences of a worm, Russian peasants and the last people on another planet (“A Story About the Main Thing”). And instead of types, one meets individuals: the vivacious Didi in her black pajamas: “In this costume and with closely clipped hair—girl-boy—she resembled a medieval page: because of pages like this prim ladies easily forgot their knights and quite willingly tossed the rope ladder down from the balcony of the tower” (The Islanders); the shy old monk Arsiusha: “Shaggy, bent-over—he was like some kind of small beast: the friendly beast stands on its hind paws but does not entirely straight­ en up, now it drops to its forepaws and runs from the disruptive people into the forest” (“The Sign”); the protective mother Mrs. Fitzgerald: “She was a turkey: her head was always sideways on her stretched-out neck, and one eye was always turned upwards, to the sky, from where any moment a kite might swoop down and carry off one of her nine little turkeys” (“Fisher of Men”). In a word, Zamyatin avoids long forms, narrative development, realistic devices and standard literary depiction. With these categories eliminated, one is ready to study Zamyatin's work—a collection of stories and short novels. These might be arranged into a number of genres (skaz, impious parable, science-fiction, pastoral, 0. Henry short story, etc.), but there is one feature common to all: an original form or technique. For Zamyatin, life 118

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had ceased to be “flatly realistic,” it had become dynamic and complex; writers could no longer merely describe life—they needed to organize it, resolve new problems and seek new forms. Zamyatin advised writers to avoid “topical” literary trends, the description of the daily round (byt) and narratives about workers’ projects. Instead, he believed, the writer should maintain a broad “contemporary” view, align his work with the “huge fantastic sweep of spirit in our epoch” (not byt, but bytie) and therefore fuse realism with fantasy.1 The embodiment of this view in Zamyatin’s work is an original stylistic system, sometimes called “neo-realism.” I prefer to call it “stylization”—to emphasize the form and avoid the overtones of the term “realism.” To analyze this stylization is to X-ray it: the skeletal structure shows up in a bright light, while the flesh and blood (meaning, emotion, spirit) appear only as a dim shading. Yet it is well to analyze, for this structure is original and helps us to understand at least a little of the power and thrust of the body. We shall concentrate on Zamyatin’s “second period” (1917-31, but mainly the 20s)—stories and novels written after the provincial satires ("A Provincial Tale,” Alatyr,” etc.) and before the works written in emigration (the novel The Scourge of God, the story “The Lion,” etc.). Plays also are not treated. For the purpose of analysis, Zamyatin’s stylization may be reduced to three components: language, imagery and theme. These compo­ nents are not mutually exclusive and may often overlap: language may be imagery and imagery may be theme.

1. Language

The key to the language of Zamyatin’s work is found in his own lecture to beginning writers, “On Language” (O iazyke, 1920). Here he recommended not “literary language,” which he deemed “oratorical” and “corsetted,” but “popular language.” For Zamyatin this meant brief statements, few subordinate clauses, diminutive forms, particles and colloquialisms. An artistic use of this language, he reasoned, promoted greater economy, vitality and cohesion.2 The colloquial aspect of “popular language” affects all of Zamyatin’s works, but particularly those of the first period. It involves a mimicry of local dialects, word play and improvization in the Gogol-Leskov-Remizov tradition. The two-page story “It’s the honest truth” (Pravda istinnaia, dated 1917), for example, offers the following curiosities: the colloquialisms dorit’ (instead of darit'), lysishchii (instead of lysyi), bashka (instead of go/ova); the expressions

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vidimo-nevidimo, podi-ka, zhit’ dura-duroi; and the mistakes vobche (vovse plus voobshche), ogromadnyi (ogromnyi plus gromadnyi) and navozryd plakat' (navoz plus navzryd). Zamyatin uses such verbal de­ vices not so much as ornaments (as the term “ornamentalism” would suggest) as an element of composition: they always reflect the mental­ ity of the character, either directly (first-person speech, skaz) or in­ directly (third-person speech, depicting the world as the character sees it). In the present story this produces a sentimental effect: a letter from a girl to her mother reveals that despite her assurances (“it’s the honest truth!”), she is suffering in the city and longs for the village. In the story “Comrade Churygin Has the Floor” (1926), it produces a satiric effect: the narrator relates a story in a mixture of his local dialect and common Soviet expressions ("Pervo-na-pervo, uvazhaemye grazhdanochki. . .”); when his brother is told by a nobleman that the statue before him is Mars, the brother takes off his hat in respect (thinking the statue to be Marx). However, in Zamyatin’s major works—We, “The Cave,” “Mamai,” “A Story About the Main Thing”—colloquial speech is not so prominent: it is either synthesized with literary language or alternates with it (as dialogue). The chief contribution of “popular language” to Zamyatin’s styliza­ tion is brevity. Zamyatin not only avoided long sentences with subordin­ ate clauses, but often eliminated grammatical parts of speech. With this technique he sought to reproduce what he called "thought language” (myslennyi iazyk)—the speed language of “pieces, fragments and additions.” The reader is thus given only the guidelines to the action: faced with incomplete sentences (aposiopesis), changes of construc­ tion (anacoluthon) and bare allusions, he is forced to fill in the missing links, to think, and, in a sense, to create with the author. The story which uses this technique with the most marked effect is “A Story About the Main Thing” (Rasskaz o samom glavnom, 1923). Here is the first de­ scription of the heroine: Thick, bent under the weight of flowers, lilac branches. Under them—embroidered here and there by the sun, shade; in the shade—Talia. Her thick, bent down by the weight of some kind of flowers, lashes.3

The absence of verbs in this passage makes an impressionistic effect: Talia is seen in three swift glances. Later in the same story, Zamyatin’s thought language is used to express a heightened, shocked awareness of life: Kukoverov smokes hungrily, on his cigarette grows a gray, slightly curly ash, in his head the watch hands spin around like mad.

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"But this: we're together—by the window on the stool, the sky—and something . . . Yes: streetcar bells—and this seemed to us like . . . like . . . And now—you and I . . . funny! I kept thinking . . . This cup of water, tin—here, see the dirt at the top under the seam? You understand—I looked at it and thought: tomorrow it will be absolutely the same . . . You, maybe, the most absolute emptiness, a wasteland, nothing—and. you understand, I think: suddenly to see there this same cup and the dirt on it here—maybe, this is such an incredible joy—such a ... Or to see: a worm crawling—nothing more: a worm.

Kukoverov’s monologue (a long one by Zamyatin’s standards) is bereft of complete sentences, yet the reader understands that the hero is taking his last look at life, and also that his executioner is his childhood friend. In conjunction with “thought language,” Zamyatin employed the device of misleading statements or “false assertions” (as he called them). This is a standard ploy of irony: by stressing the truth of what is patently false, the author makes the false appear ludicrous. In The Islanders (Ostrovitiane, 1917-18) one runs across statements such as this: As is well known, a cultured person should to the best of his ability have no face. That is, he should not be completely without a face, but the face should be like a face, and then not like a face—so it doesn't catch your eye, like clothes sewn by an excellent tailor. It goes without saying that a cultured person's face should be exactly like that of other cultured persons, and of course it by no means should change in any of life’s situations.

The use of false assertions in We is a tour de force, a modern equiva­ lent of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. Here insidious spies are called “Guardian Angels,” imagination and love are labelled “diseases,” a tyrant is regarded as "the Benefactor” and so on. As may be expected with such an experimental writer, Zamyatin makes extensive use of the oxymoron. He may do this on a broad scale (imagery and theme)—a dog with eyes of “sad, human wisdom” (“Eyes,” 1917), Didi as a male "page,” a monk who gives birth to a boy ("The Miracle of Ash Wednesday,” 1923)—or on the smaller verbal scale. The following examples are taken from The Islanders: charmingly outrageous (porcelain pug) outrageously dear (intelligent people) tender points (of Didi) a prickily tender something (of Didi) sweetly acrid (gillyflower) happily exhausted (Vicar Dooley) joyfully shameful (to be with Didi)

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Gary Kern reproachfully caressingly (way of speaking) ornamentally forged (streetlight) dog-human (hammer head) (These combinations are hyphenated in the Russian: prelestno-bezobraznyi, bezobrazno-milye, sladostno-edkii, etc.)

Another peculiarity of Zamyatin’s language (more properly, syntax) is his highly personal system of punctuation. The frequency of dots and dashes in thought language (e.g., Kukoverov’s monologue) facilitates rapid transition: the reader is presented with a brief thought, a dash and then another thought; three dots slow up the pace; then thought, dash, thought again. The alternation of these two marks—fast (dash) and slow (dots)—stimulates a feeling of nervousness, breathlessness and peculiar precision, like knife-throwing. A passage from "The Cave” (Peshchera, 1920): Suddenly light: exactly ten o’clock. And without finishing. Martin Martinych squinched, turned away: in the light it was more difficult than in the dark. And in the light one could clearly see: his face was crumpled, clayey (many now had clayey faces: back—to Adam). But Masha: And you know, Mart, I might try—maybe I'll get up ... if you warmed it up in the morning. "Well, Masha, of course . . . Such a day . . . Well, of course, in the morning."

This passage also exemplifies Zamyatin's persistent use of the colon. It too marks a change of thought, but often it also represents a lens through which images are reversed. Bits and pieces of ideas are presented before the colon, which focuses them into a generalized concept: Glaciers, mammoths, wastes. Nocturnal, black, somehow similar to houses, cliffs: in the cliffs caves. And it is not known who trumpets at night on the stone path between the cliffs and, sniffing out the path, blows up the white snowy dust; maybe a grey-trunked mammoth; maybe the wind, and maybe—the wind itself is the frozen roar of some kind of most mammothian mammoth. One thing is clear: winter. (First lines of “The Cave")

The fragmented world is unified in a capsule understanding, but it may be fragmented again. Zamyatin often reverses the motion (general concept, then pieces), changes the viewpoint (telescope, then microscope). The world: a lilac bush—eternal, immense, immeasurable. In this world I: a yellowish pink worm Rhapolocera with a horn on my tail. Today—I am to die into a

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chrysalis, my body twisted with pain, bent over as a bridge—taut, trembling. And if I knew how to scream—if I knew!—all would hear. I'm mute. Another world: a mirror of a river, a transparent bridge of iron and blue sky; shots, clouds. (First lines of “A Story About the Main Thing")

All the devices mentioned impart a special rhythm to Zamyatin’s writing. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Zamyatin did not distinguish prose from poetry. For him both were qualitatively the same, both used the same means of “instrumentation.” Poetry with a fixed metrical pattern differed from prose only superficially.4 He wrote: “In the analysis of prose rhythm even Andrei Belyi—a most subtle investigator of verbal music—made a mistake: he attached the [metrical] foot to prose (hence his illness—chronic anapest) . .. The prose foot is mea­ sured not by the distance between stressed syllables, but by the dis­ tance between (logically) stressed words . . . Meter in prose is always an alternating magnitude; one always finds delays, then accelerations. These, of course, are not accidental: they are determined by the emo­ tional delays and accelerations in the text.”5 The musical quality of Zamyatin’s prose, of course, can only be suggested in translation. A short example of his Russian from the story “The Sign” (Znamenie, 1918): Shia vsenoshchnaia, bednaia, budniaia. Redkie svechi—tsvety paporotnika v kupal’skuiu noch'; v temnom kupole—gulkoe alliluia; mimo svetleiuschikh okon—lastochki s piskom, iz vysi v vys'. I tarn—chut' povyshe lastochek—bog.

2. Imagery

Few of Zamyatin’s images are occasional, used once and then abandoned. As he explained: “I rarely make use of single, chance images: these are only sparks, they live a second and go out, they are forgotten. The chance image comes from an inability to concentrate, to really see, to believe. If I firmly believe in an image, it inevitably gives birth to a whole system of derivative images, it grows by the roots through paragraphs, pages. In a short story the image may become integral—it spreads through the entire piece from beginning to end.”6 An integral image could be named for almost every one of Zamyatin’s stories. The most contrived, and therefore unsuccessful example is the story "The Play Room” (Detskaia, 1920). Here a hap­ less gambler Semyon Semyonych plays cards with the adept Capt. Krug. The Capt., whose face is “locked up,” relates how he once pulled

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the head off a fly, and whenever Semyon loses a hand he “wipes his face like a fly.” While Semyon plays to his inevitable defeat, a fly strains desperately to escape from a sticky ring (krug) left by a glass on the table. The most famous and, I think, successful integral image is found in “The Cave”: frozen Petrograd is likened to prehistoric times, hence houses are cliffs, apartments are caves, the stove is a cast-iron god, and so on. In the novels integral images proliferate and interact. Thus, in The Islanders, Vicar Dooley is “a smoothly running machine,” his shy wife is “a pince-nez” and the hero, the slow-witted Kimble, is “a lumber­ ing tractor." When an accident brings Kimble into the Dooleys’ life, he becomes “a foreign body,” the inconvenienced Vicar becomes “an overturned train” and Mrs. Dooley loses her pince-nez. The other character-images interact with these object-images: O’Kelly is “four waving arms,” Macintosh is “a football head,” Didi is “a medieval page" or her own “porcelain pug,” the parish secretaries are "Remingtonists” or simply “pinks and blues” (the color of their knees) and Lady Kimble is “the carcass of a broken umbrella” with “a head pulled by invisible reins,” a “mummy face” and “writhing worm lips.” The reader of We quickly becomes attuned to the integral image: it is the opposite of “The Cave.” The hero D-503 laughs at the ancient people of the twentieth century who were unable to reach “the last rung of the logical ladder.” So the new Soviet state is transported to this last rung: Lenin becomes the Benefactor, Pravda—the one and only State Gazette, the unions of proletarian writers—the one and only State Un­ ion of Poets and Writers, their poetry—2x2 = 4, the Cheka—the Bureau of Guardians, faith in the Party—servility to the One State, one party choice—the Day of Unanimity, party guidance—pediculture, the Table of Hours, obligatory walks, etc., and the world revolution—a uni­ versal one. Further, the perspective of engineer D-503 gives rise to a whole system of mathematical and geometric images: 0-90 is “made up entirely of circumferences,” her mouth says O, she has a babylike ring around her wrist; I-330 has facial lines like an X—the unknown quantity—and a metallic voice; the Benefactor has cast-iron hands which move with the weight of a hundred tons. These images are not simply repeated, but treated like verbs, inflected by all the conjugations. They interact with the mathematical songs and formulas for happiness, love and death. Opposing them are images representing the hidden, primitive side of man: D-503's hairy hands and “shaggy I,” l-330's sharp teeth and eyebrow horns, U's brick red cheek-gills, the name of the revolutionary movement—Mephi, the mocking, disruptive force of Mephistopheles. All these images may be complicated by thought

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language, false assertions and subordinate images, such as Biblical, zoological, technological, etc. Finally, Zamyatin's imagery may be made on different levels. The diary of D-503 represents three planes of action: 1 ) the experiences of a man from the thirtieth century; 2) the woman who reads the diary, informs on people mentioned in it and therefore affects its outcome; 3) the reader of the twentieth century who has received the diary by rocket (D-503 appears to be on earth, yet his diary must reach us from another planet; perhaps Zamyatin intended an advanced duplicate world).7 Such parallelism finds its apotheosis in “A Story About the Main Thing” (Rasskaz o samom glavnom, 1923). Here events already in the past appear in present-tense narration which predicts their outcome in the future; they are said to take place in “an instant, an hour” or “a day, a century,” and they occur both on earth and on a star. Four planes of existence (with related imagery) are indicated: a worm, a Russian, people on the star and the author. All are doomed: the worm is dying, the Russian is sentenced to death, the people have drunk their last bottle of air and the star is hurtling toward the earth. The structure of the story is based on the alternation of these four planes: the chapters alternate between earth and the star. Clearly Zamyatin, in this last major experiment, was trying to give new literary form to modern consciousness. The result is not an unqualified success, but the effort was noble. For who would have believed that after Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and Gödel, writers would still write novels with one (omniscient) consciousness, one plane of existence and occasional images? Zamyatin is still ahead of the time. 3. Theme There is an alternating current which runs through Zamyatin’s work. His focus shifts from telescopic to microscopic, his tone—from epic to lyric, his images—from mathematical to zoological, his sentences, from fast to slow, his words—from literary to colloquial. This fluctuation can be reduced to one principle: tension between opposites. This principle relates to the philosophical view expressed in Zamyatin’s essays: existence as the continuous struggle between en­ tropy and energy, the former tending toward repose and death, the latter striving toward action and life. On the human plane, entropy is seen in custom, tradition, dogmatization; energy—in change, revolution, skepticism. Only by the victory of energy over entropy, Zamyatin argued, are vitality and progress maintained—in society, religion, art and thought.0

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Zamyatin used the theme of entropy-energy throughout his career. Alexander Voronsky noted that the works of Zamyatin's first period present the victory of entropy: the mental and moral stagnation of pro­ vincial Russia. With the satires of the second period, however, entropy is challenged by energy. In The Islanders the staid, respectable world of English hypocrites is upset by uninhibited bohemians: the Vicar loses Kimble's soul to Didi and his wife’s heart to Kimble. In “Fisher of Men" the reserved Mrs. Craggs, frightened by a bombing attack near her house, rushes into the street to kiss her outrageous admirer, Bailey. But in both, entropy wins in the end: Didi and Kimble are destroyed and the Vicar’s regimented life returns like a repaired machine; Mrs. Craggs is not bombed and resumes her drab life with her husband. Yet the victory of entropy is only apparent: it is clearly related to the technique of false assertions. In Zamyatin’s third period, it might be added, energy triumphs: Attila leads his hordes of robust Mongols against the rotting West (The Scourge of God). The theme of entropy-energy is most fully realized in We: D-503’s thoughtless slavery is punctured by free-thinking I-330, and the mono­ lithic One State is challenged by revolution. The outcome is a false assertion: the apparent victory of entropy. Many commentators regard such an outcome as pessimistic: the author supposedly believes that entropy conquers all. This view contradicts Zamyatin's own statements (in essays) and ignores the obvious artistic result: the reader sides wholly with the forces of energy. Many other themes in Zamyatin's works might be enumerated, but let us briefly consider only three: love, transgression and fate. Zamyatin’s love stories are usually tragic, with a peculiar twist: the land surveyor is given every opportunity to confess his love to Lizaveta Petrovna but is overcome by shyness, does not speak and loses her forever (Zemlemer, 1918). D-503’s love for I-330 is scientifically extracted, he betrays her and watches her execution. Marka recipro­ cates a young man’s love, but wants him to bow down before her (according to ancient custom); when he refuses and dares to kiss her, she renounces him (Kuny, 1922). In these and other stories, love is a rare chance, an awakening, the “most important thing." The theme of transgression naturally derives from the energy-entropy dialectic. In addition to We and the English satires, it occurs in impious fables. The novice Erasmus, tormented with curiosity about a girl he has seen, paints a voluptuous picture which incites the monks to riot. After order is restored, the abbot satisfies Erasmus’ curiosity by permitting the girl to spend the night in his cell. ("How the Novice Erasmus Was Healed," 1920.) In another, the father of a boy

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given birth by a monk turns out to be the Archbishop. (“The Miracle of Ash Wednesday,” 1923.) These and other such tales make the obvious point: dogma is hypocritical, opposed to life, pleasure and freedom. The theme of fate may be seen in works already discussed: “The Play Room,” "The Cave,” We and “A Story About the Main Thing.” Two aspects may be distinguished: destruction (first two works) and rebirth (latter two). These two aspects correspond, of course, to entropy and energy. Thus, in the last story, the earth is destroyed when the star crashes into it, but in order that there be “new, fiery creatures,” and after them “new, light-like . . . human flowers.”

4. The Dominanta Zamyatin’s prose has been segmented into three periods; the works of the second period have been broken down into three components, the components have been reduced to devices. Such analysis may tell us something about the structure of the body, but not so much about the whole organism. We see the bones, we may even see the muscles, but we do not see the intelligence which makes the body move. The Russian Formalists, aware of this problem, the tenden­ cy of literary analysis to become static, sought a dynamic concept and found it in the “dominanta.” Boris Eikhenbaum wrote: “Artistic works are always the result of a complex battle between various formative elements, always a sort of compromise. These elements do not simply coexist and do not simply ‘correspond’ to each other. Depending on the general nature of the style, one or another element has the significance of an organizing dominanta which prevails over the others and sub­ ordinates them to itself."9 Unfortunately, Eikhenbaum, Tynyanov and others mainly defined the dominanta; they gave few extended exam­ ples of its use as a critical instrument. Yet there are several writers of the early Soviet period whose dominanta, so to say, leaps into view. The dominanta of Babel is the irreconcilable union of beauty and cruelty, tenderness and violence, love and carnage. The red pearl of blood rolling down the stallion’s white neck—this is Babel’s dominanta, which can be found in his imagery, his composition,, his philosophy, his biography. Pilnyak also writes under an obvious dominanta: intentional chaos. His works are not like shuffled decks of cards, contrary to Tynyanov and Goffman, for in real life many cards randomly fall into place. With Pilnyak the cards are stacked: information is presented to the reader in a composed disorder. This is the dominanta which controls his works and relates to

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his philosophy of spontaneity—itself an oxymoron. The structural dominanta in the works of Shklovsky is the “baring of the device" through parody, digression and direct address.10 Olesha's works lend them­ selves to analysis by means of the dominanta: his famous shift of perspective from telescope to microscope, belief in perspective as a way to the third world of imagination. And then, Zamyatin: the integral image. It is chosen for each work from a satiric perspective, a negentropic philosophy, and it brings under its dominance the devices of thought language, irony (false assertions) and subordinate images. The crea­ tive shaping of the work within this system is what has been called stylization. The trouble with the concept of the dominanta is that critics will disagree on which element is dominant and formative, which emerges from which—the philosophy from the imagery, or vice versa? Other questions arise: What did the author take from his predecessors, his contemporaries, his time? How did he transform these influences and elements into his own personal creation? Is the dominanta his talent—the thing that is left when all traceable materials are subtracted from his work, or the work into which he transforms them? Or is it not a personal achievement at all, but merely a conjunction of time, place and person? Such questions lead away from easy analysis toward psychology, history and a philosophy of art.

Notes

1. The essays "Tsel"' ("The Goal," 1919) and "Novaia russkaia proza" ("New Rus­ sian Prose," 1923) in Litsa (New York, 1955). Both translated by Mirra Ginsburg in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago. 1970). 2. “O iazyke,” Novyi zhurnal No. 77, 1964. Trans, by Ginsburg, op. cit. 3. Russian text in Evgeny Zamiatin. Povesti i rasskazy (Munich. 1963). Trans, by Mirra Ginsburg in The Dragon: Fifteen Stories by Yevgeny Zamyatin (New York. 1966). My translation here and elsewhere attempts to retain Zamyatin's technique of thought language. This technique is always obliterated in translation by the need for a "smooth reading." This need is contrary to that of the present article. 4. "O iazyke," op. cit. 5. "Zakulisy" (1929), Litsa, 269-70. Trans, by Ginsburg as "Backstage." Zamyatin’s attitude toward Belyi seems to have been a love-hate relationship. (See Alex Shane. The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, 1968, p. 225, n. 27.) Obviously he struggled under Belyi's strong influence: myslennyi iazyk has much in common with Belyi's mozgovaia igra (cerebral play). Zamyatin's indebtedness to. and departure from. Belyi requires a separate study. 6. “Zakulisy," 270. 7. The translation of Bernard Guilbert Guerney includes a footnote by a Venusian

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researcher, but since I cannot find this note in the Russian text or any other translation, I suspect the invention of B. G. G. An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960), 235. 8. “O literature, revoliutsii, entropii i o prochem” (1923), Litsa, 249 ff. Trans, by Ginsburg. 9. B. Eikhenbaum, "Melodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha" (1922), included in 0 poezii (Leningrad: 1969), 332. In a footnote Eikhenbaum states that the term is taken from B. Christiansen’s Philosophy of Art (Russian translation by G. P. Fedotov, 1911). 10. As noted by Fyodor Grits in his study “The Work of Viktor Shklovsky” (1926), included in V. Shklovsky, Third Factory, trans, by Richard Sheldon (Ann Arbor, 1977), esp. 103ff.

ZAMYATIN’S AESTHETICS Milton Ehre

Zamyatin entered Russian literature in 1913 upon the demise of Symbolism as a coherent literary movement.1 His views of art were shaped by the Symbolist heritage and the post-1910 polemics of the avant-garde with the Symbolist past. The Symbolists differed among themselves as artists and thinkers but were united in devotion to form as an “absolute value” in art.2 They placed the word at the center of their aesthetics. The word was seen as a “kind of energy” (ibid., 15) and literature was “above all, language.”3 Their faith in the primacy of the word led them to various linguistic innovations—neologisms, striking sound patterns, a broadening of vocabulary. The Symbolist interest in myth and the effort of many Sym­ bolists to restore a mythic apprehension of life (Viacheslav Ivanov) or create new myths of the modern city (Aleksandr Blok) induced a con­ cern with the evocative rather than the descriptive powers of language. Literature became “a process of conjuring” where “every word is a magical formula.”4 What the artist was to describe were not the “secrets” of life, but “a magically experienced reality” (Holthusen, p. 32). Though the artist was free to distort and deform, to introduce fantastical and grotesque elements into his work, the starting point for this magical and mythic apprehension of the world resided in language, in its musical and evocative powers. The post-1910 attacks on Symbolism centered on the metaphysic­ al yearnings (or pretensions, as their enemies would have it) of Symbol­ ist aesthetics. Young writers rejected the high seriousness of the Symbolists, their myth-building, and the quest for a higher transcenden­ tal reality. The Acmeists spurned the “hopeless Germanic earnestness” of the Symbolists and turned to irony, wit and clarity, which they sought in Romance (especially French) literatures.5 The Futurists reacted against what they felt to be the excessive “sweetness and melodiousness" of the Symbolists’ language and worked for a “tougher," more “prosaic" language.6 The Zavety group, which was led by Remizov and to which Zamyatin belonged, recoiled from the eclectic Alexandrian character of much Symbolist writing and set out “to

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de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language and to res­ tore to it its natural Russian raciness.”7 But if the post-1910 avant-garde denied a place to metaphysics in art and objected to the musicality of Symbolist language, it nevertheless remained indebted to its forerunner. Concentration on the word, linguistic experimentation and verbal play, exploitation of the evocative power of language, interest in fantasy and the grotesque continue to characterize much of Russian literature in the decade before and after World War I. This dialectical motion of revolt against the Symbolist heritage and simultaneous acceptance of many of its aspects characterizes Zamyatin’s aesthetics and much of his prose. His career can be under­ stood as an attempt to do in prose what the Acmeists and Futurists were attempting in poetry—to establish in theory and exemplify in works the basis for an avant-garde literature. Zamyatin is most insistent in rejecting Realism and Naturalism, which are the dominant traditions of Russian fiction. The stable world that any realism presupposes, whether “bourgeois" or Socialist Realism, is an unreal “convention” and an “abstraction.” The conventions of Realism are totally incompati­ ble with the electric, Einsteinian, technological age in which we live.8 The prose fiction that would catch the quickened tempos of modern life Zamyatin calls alternately Neorealism and Synthesism. It was intended, as we shall see, to provide a temporary synthesis of Realism and Symbolism in the never-ending dialectical process that, in Zamyatin’s view, constitutes literary and human history. Zamyatin, along with almost everybody else, sees Belyi as the paradigmatic figure of the new prose.9 Through his polychromatic style and multileveled structures Belyi was able to capture the complexity of modern life. In Belyi, Zamyatin writes, mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, and the foxtrot are rolled into one (the foxtrot, or jazz, is Zamyatin’s metaphor for the disjointed and intense rhythms of the mod­ ern scene). “The language of our epoch is quick and sharp, like a code,” he remarks in a survey of the new Russian prose.10 However, Zamyatin has certain reservations about Belyi’s contribution. The former student of Remizov wonders whether one may properly say that Belyi’s books are written in Russian. His language is so full of neologisms, his syntax is so unusual that it strikes us as a very special language—the language of Belyi, he finds, suffered from a chronic illness—anapests. Prose and poetry, or at least poetry written in meter, have limits that preserve their integrity. The rhythms of metric­ al poetry are built upon individual units—upon feet. Prose deals with sums of units: “The prose foot is not measured by the distance between stressed syllables, but by the distance between stressed (logically)

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words.” The “meter" of prose is not one of regular shifts of articulation; prose treats “changing quantities” instead of "constant” ones—now the tempo is slowed down, now it is quickened, according to the "emotional" emphases of the language.11 What Zamyatin objects to is not musicality of prose as such, but the regularity that Belyi's prose often exhibits. A prose rhythm that is too regular and too periodic, he fears, is in danger of losing its integrity as prose. The following passage from “The Protectress of Sinners" (“Spodruchnitsa greshnykh,” 1922) is illustrative of Zamyatin’s use of rhythmic prose.12 Glut)1, cherno, lokhmato: log, v logu—les. Skovz’ chernoe—vysoko nad golovoi monastyrskie steny s zubtsami, nad zubtsam'i—zvezdy. I slyshno: tarn pod stenoi storozh v dosku tukaet.

Most of the passage falls into traditional metrical feet, though the arrangement is irregular: six iambs with catalexis at the opening and the pause between logu and les counting as a syllable in the first sentence,13 the rising intonation continued in the second sentence where iambs and anapests accumulate, and a return to six feet in the last sentence but with a shift to trochees and a dactyl in the last three feet to close out the sentence. However, though Zamyatin provides the passage with metrical underpinnings, which undoubtedly contribute to its rhythmic quality, he avoids turning his prose into verse. He avoids it by introducing pauses and emphases which counteract the flow of the line. The first sentence, for example, is a string of rather isolated words, almost all of which contain a complete thought. Their insularity lends them emphasis. Log and les are made especially emphatic by punctuation, alliteration, and repetition (log, v logu), by their position under stress, by their monosyllabic character, and by the semantic and syntactic weight that accrues to them. Glub', cherno, and lokhmato, though a noun and two adverbs, give the attributes of log; v logu is an adverbial phrase giving the location of the only other concrete noun in the sentence, les. The sentence does not flow evenly along its metrical line, but explodes through a row of relatively isolated terms to the more fully charged log and les. What determines the rhythmic quality of the passage are, as is usual in rhythmic prose, syntactical parallelisms and verbal echoes that run from phrase to phrase and sentence to sentence.14 Besides the alliterations of I which help balance the first sentence (lokhmato: log, v logu—les), there are other striking alliterations and consonances of s, st, and z. A dash and the lonely les ends the first sentence. It finds its

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echo in the solitary zvezdy, also after a dash, of sentence two. Skvoz’ chernoe and dash open the second sentence, and I slyshno of the third sentence provides a rhythmic parallel; s zubtsami resonates against nad zubtsami, as does vysoko nad golovoi against tarn pod stenoi. The most striking example of such symmetrical phrasing is of course the string of relatively isolated words that comprise the first sentence. Ver­ bal echoes, repetitions, and syntactical parallelisms are the building blocks of Zamyatin’s rhythmic prose. His rhythms are often, as here, complex and intense. They always avoid mellifluousness by highlight­ ing and dramatizing the individual word (log, les) and phrase (skvoz' chernoe, I slyshno). Zamyatin conceives the image in terms analogous to his concep­ tion of prose style. The quickened tempos of modern life do not tolerate the “slow, horse-and-buggy descriptions” of nineteenth-century Realism. The age demands that syntax become “elliptical, volatile,” and the image must also convey “quickness of motion.” “The image is sharp, synthetic; there is only one basic feature in it, the kind you can manage to take note of from a speeding automobile” (Litsa, 255). A “synthetic image is one that is inclusive, that summarizes a. fleeting experience (ibid., 208). Character is expressed through reduction to a single image that is then threaded through the work until it becomes a leitmotif. The image, in Zamyatin's aesthetics, “inevitably gives birth to an entire system of derivative images” which may serve as an “integrating” force to hold the story together (ibid., 270). The symbolism, as well as the lexicon, of a literature so perceived may seem “unusual, often strange” (ibid., 255). “Sharpness” of language and imagery—Zamyatin employs the same term for both—distinguishes Neorealism from Symbolism. “In contrast to the Symbolists,” he writes, “the Neorealists . . . employ characters who are exaggeratedly vivid, sculptured; the colors are ex­ aggeratedly and sharply bright.”15 This sculptured quality is set against the mellifluousness of Symbolist language and the haze of the Symbol­ ist landscape. Zamyatin often calls his and his contemporaries’ art “impressionistic,” but if impressionism is the right term—and I do not think it is—it is an impressionism closer to the solidity of Cezanne than the fluidity of late Monet. It is a similar solidity that Picasso and Braque, looking back to Cezanne, were working for in the Cubist experiments, which were taking place in the same years that witnessed the Russian revolt against Symbolism. The essential mode of Neorealism or Synthesism is ironic. Zamyatin employs the Hegelian dialectic to illustrate the new literature’s relation to traditional Realism and Symbolism. Realism was the thesis,

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Symbolism the antithesis, Neorealism or Synthesism is the integration of both into a new art. Or, in a suggestive image he uses in the essay, "On Synthesism,” first there was Eve who was all flesh, the Eve of Tolstoi, Zola, Rubens, Gorky (Realism). Then the artist rejected the Eve of flesh for the Eve of unattainable and tragic longing whose other name was Death (Symbolism, Idealism). Finally, contemporary man, the new Adam, returns to the Eve of flesh, but he is no longer the same. He has been poisoned by his knowledge of the second Eve. Beneath Eve's flesh the new Adam, Adam become wise, can see the skeleton. From her kisses he carries away a bittersweet taste of irony. Among the artists who represent the third stage, the synthesis, he includes Whitman, Gauguin, Seurat, and Picasso.16 The new art, then, assumes traditional Realism’s power over the flesh and the earth. It seeks mas­ tery of the concrete and the specific. Though it rejects Symbolism’s idealistic yearning, it is unable to overcome the worldly skepticism of the Symbolists. A vivid sense of the real world combines with a pro­ found doubt as to the possibilities of that world. This paradoxical situa­ tion of rootedness in reality and skepticism about the ultimate value of that reality leaves the modern artist with a pervasive irony. Neorealism, in Zamyatin’s aesthetic formulation as well as in his literary practice, bears little resemblance to the central tradition of nineteenth-century Realism. Paradoxically, its realism lies in “displacement, deformation, misshaping, and nonobjectivity.” It permits the grotesque and fantasy—indeed Zamyatin calls his realism “fantastical” (Litsa, 255, 237-38). Neorealism was a misleading term in that it suggested a stylistic affinity to Realism that it did not have. Actually it in many ways continued the Symbolist experiment in its concern with the musical powers of language, and its interest in metaphor and myth. What distinguishes it from Symbolism is its preference for the sharp as against the hazy, for irony as against mystical and meta­ physical longing. Historical periodization necessarily blurs the complex­ ities of a given moment. Zamyatin is aware of the diversity of Symbolism, of its ironic as well as its metaphysical aspects, of its fre­ quent use of “low” detail. Indeed the Belyi of Petersburg and the Blok of The Twelve are for him essentially Neorealists.17 Nevertheless, he argues, in its desire to connect with a transcendental order Symbolism remained a nineteenth-century phenomenon; it kept a bridge open to Romanticism.18 Neorealism is burning the bridges, and in doing so it becomes the truly modern, an art expressive of an age when absolutes have gone up in smoke. The abandonment of the vision of a transcen­ dental order, despite continued skepticism about the world as it is, has

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changed the nature of art.19 Irony replaces high seriousness. A trans­ cendental Symbolism becomes impossible. The symbols of Neorealism, because they are deprived of higher correspondences, turn from hieratic signs into mere aesthetic tropes. The work does not strive upward to das Ewige but remains a self-contained artifact. “The Fisher of Men” (“Lovets chelovekov,” 1922) is characteristic of the kind of story Zamyatin wrote in the early years of the Soviet era, which was the most productive and perhaps the central period of his career.20 It can show us what Neorealism meant in practice. The story is set in wartime London. Its central character is Mr. Craggs, a respect­ able English bourgeois. He is an apostle of the Society for Struggle Against Vice—and an inveterate voyeur. He spends his Sundays (after church) in Hampstead Heath, where he mounts a soapbox to rally the reluctant natives to do battle against vice and consecrate themselves to virtue before the impending apocalypse, which in the story takes the form of German zeppelins. His missionary zeal carries him into the bushes of the park to stalk young lovers. Upon finding them in com­ promising attitudes, he threatens to summon the police unless they pay him. Virtue combines with sound business sense. Craggs’ wife, almost but not quite as virtuous as he, fearing that she may perish in an air raid without having tasted of life, ultimately succumbs to the blandishments of a sexy church organist. The story presents a favorite Zamyatin con­ frontation between puritanical rigidity and sexual expression. The story, like most of Zamyatin’s fictions, turns on its imagery.21 Each character is expressed by one or several images. For Mr. Craggs, they are either metallic images or images taken from lower forms of animal life—rodents and crustaceans. The color pink is associated with the church organist Bailey, who seduces Mrs. Craggs; pink is also the color of the imaginary veil that seems to cover Mrs. Craggs’ mouth; the beautiful girl Craggs pursues in Hampstead Heath is associated with apples and a raspberry-colored umbrella. The images, through repeti­ tion and their accessibility to categorization, turn into symbols: the metallic images represent frigidity, pink and raspberry, sexuality.22 However the images are more than mere signatures of a character or signs of a value. “The Fisher of Men” presents a series of meta­ morphoses whereby characters become the things they are associated with. The first time we encounter Mr. Craggs he is eating crabs: “S kusochkami krabovykh kleshnei proglatyvaia kusochki slov mister Kraggs chital vslukh gazetu.” A few pages later and he has acquired crab claws. (Povesti i rasskazy, 121, 126-27). The movement is from an association with crabs—through the witty consonances of k (and g, kh) and the paralleling of “pieces of words” and “pieces of crab

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claws”—to an identification with crabs, i.e., from metonymy to realized metaphor. Similarly, the beautiful lady under the raspberry umbrella, who is the prey of one of Craggs' voyeuristic hunts, is compared to an apple, only to become, through an exotic realization of the metaphor, Lady Apple. Let us follow Craggs in his hunt: Mr. Craggs walked, carrying before him on his stomach huge crab claws and lowering his eyelids. Lowering his cast-iron eyelids, Mr. Craggs ate, and at the neighboring table the beautiful lady beneath the raspberry umbrella ate. She was entirely drenched (natta) in the amber sap of the sun: it was painfully necessary that someone drink of her, even a bit. Apples in the windless, sultry evening: they have already become full (nalilis’), transparent, they are gasping—oh, but to break off quickly from the branch, and to the earth. She rose, Lady Apple beneath the raspberry umbrella, and her Adam rose—it’s all the same who he is; he is only the earth. . . . Mr. Craggs waited a moment. Sill hiding something under his lowered cast-iron eyelids, he clambered up a hill, looked about—and with rat-like quickness. . . . rushed down [after them]. There, below, everything quickly became fuzzy, everything was overgrown with the violet wool of night: trees, people. Under the fragrant furs of the bushes tender, overgrown beasts panted and whispered. Mr. Craggs, grown wooly, silent, poked about the park like a huge, fantastical rat; the blades of his eyes sparkled on his wooly snout; Mr. Craggs panted.................................. A silent, pitch-black pond. A pair of swans in its middle become piercingly white in their nakedness. And further, beneath a cosily overhanging willow, a boat. Mr. Craggs dragged his paws more quickly across the grass. The swans came closer, whiter. On tiptoe, he cautiously leaned over the trunk of the willow. A boat below. All about it grew darker, hiding faces; a soft fuzzy umbrella, but recently raspberry, in one end of the boat, and in the other, legs became swan-white in the darkness, (p 130).

Landscape as well as character are metamorphosed. In the manner of the grotesque, the boundaries separating human, animal, and veget­ able have been obliterated.23 The beautiful lady is drenched with the amber of the sun; the association with ripening apples ready to fall to earth is made; the lady becomes Lady Apple; her Adam is the earth ready to receive her. Mr. Craggs rushes with “ratlike quickness”; the landscape becomes fuzzy (lokhmatilo) and overgrown with the “night's wool,” thereby suggesting animal characteristics; a wooly Craggs, now to all appearances a huge rat, emerges from the night. Vladimir Pozner once compared Zamyatin’s elaboration of a metaphor to the logic of the syllogism,24 swans pierce the dark night with their white nakedness; the lovers’ legs are naked and white; the lovers apparently are white swans. Through metamorphosis Zamyatin converts Hampstead Heath into the landscapes of myth. The story opened with a juxtaposition of two

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Londons: a contemporary, mechanized London of iron arches, factory chimneys, and glittering neon signs, and a primitive London of druid temples, antediluvian black swans, and skull-like houses, with a great stone phallus at its center (the Trafalgar column). The juxtaposition of the mechanical and the sexual, as we have seen, evolves through the story. Here Hampstead Heath has been converted into a prehistoric Garden of Eden, furnished appropriately with an apple tree, an Adam, and a creature that intrudes upon the bliss of paradise. In Zamyatin’s version of the myth it is a rat instead of a serpent.25 But the uses of myth are purely ironic. The great drama of man’s fall into sin has been lowered to the ordinary and its values have been reversed. Such lowerings and reversals are of course the essence of parody. While moving into the forests of myth we do not cease to be aware of the “daytime” incarnations of our characters. We remain con­ scious that our Adam and Eve are merely two ordinary Londoners out for some quick fun on a Sunday away from work, that our serpent is only a malignant and repressed voyeur disguising his fetishes behind a cloak of respectability. The original Adam and Eve fall from innocence to sex and knowledge. In Zamyatin’s version sexual enjoyment is the condition of the garden; its enemy is the mechanized routines and puritanical religiosity of bourgeois civilization. The story ends with another ironic touch, this time revealing the hand of the author. “Everything is finished” are Mrs. Craggs’ last words, a double-entendre referring both to the end of the air raid and the consummation of her desire. “Everything is finished,” the narrator reiterates to wrap up his story. Zamyatin, in a manner characteristic of him, has placed an emphatic dot at the end of his work. Its symbols and myths do not reach to intimate another order of things, but stand as part of a self-enclosed artistic play that is meant to be humorous and instructive. To summarize, Zamyatin conceived of literature as undergoing a continual and dialectical relation with Symbolism. Zamyatin continued Belyi’s experiments in rhythmic prose, but sought a prose that would be intense and concentrated instead of melodious. The image was to con­ vey an analogous intensity. Symbols were to have no higher correspondences. Zamyatin believed that the concreteness of lan­ guage and imagery of contemporary literature and its ironic rootedness in the physical world (which did not preclude fantasy) made it a syn­ thesis of Realism and Symbolism. We have argued that Neorealism continued the Symbolist experiment but that in its rejection of metaphy­ sics and turn to irony it resulted in something qualitatively different.

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1. Dates are according to Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley: Univ, of California Press, 1968). Zamjatin had published before but considered the writing of "Uezdnoe" in 1911-12 (published 1913) as the true beginning of his literary career. See Evgenii Zamiatin, "Avtobiografia," in Povesti i rasskazy (Munich 1963), 14. A version of this paper was delivered at the meetings of the Modern Language Association, December 1974. 2. J. Holthusen, Studien zur Ästhetik und Poetik des russischen Symbolismus (Göttingen, 1957), 5.1 am especially indebted to Professor Holthusen’s excellent study for my understanding of Symbolism and the reactions against it. 3. Innokentii Annenskii, “Chto takoe poèziia," Apollon, 2, no. 6 (1911), 52. 4. Andrei Belyi, “Magiia slov," Simvolizm (M.:Musaget, 1910), 431. 5. Nikolai Gumilev, "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm," Apollon, 4, no. 1 (1913), 43. 6. D. Chizhevskii, "O poèzii russkogo futurizma," Novyi zhurnal, 73 (1963), 141-42. 7. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York, 2949), 479. 8. E. Zamiatin, "O literature, revoliutsii i èntropii” (1924), Litsa (New York, 1955), 254-55. Zamyatin's essays are cited, whenever possible, according to this handy and representative collection. For original places of publication see Shane. Dates unless specified otherwise are of publication. 9. See “Andrei Belyi," in Litsa. 73-80. Written in 1934. 10. "Novaia russkaia proza" (1923), Litsa, 201. See also Litsa, 255. 11. "Zakulisy," Litsa. 269-70. The full text of this abridged essay appeared, without title, in Kak my pishem: Teoriia literatury (L: Izd. Pisatelei, 1930), 29-47. See also "O iazyke," Novyi zhurnal, IT (1964), 97. Written 1919-20. 12. Cited from Povesti i rasskazy, 73. Written in 1918. 13. The first sentence is uncertain, but the division of words, with stress on multisylla­ bic words consistently falling on the second syllable, indicates a rising intonation. 14. See V. M. Zhirmunskii, "On Rhythmic Prose," in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (3 vols.; The Hague, 1967), III, 2376-88. 15. "Sovremennaia russkaia literature," Grani, 11, no. 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1956), 97. Originally presented as a public lecture in 1918. 16. “O sintetizme” (1922), Litsa, 233-34. 17. See Litsa, 239; Grani, 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1956), 92. 18. Grani, 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1956), 92. 19. Irving Howe makes the point in discussing Zamyatin’s "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy" in his introduction to The Idea of the Modern in Literature and Arts, ed. Irving Howe (New York, 1967), 20-22. 20. The story was written in 1917-18. Shane (p. 131) calls the years 1917-21 the middle period of Zamyatin's career and notes that this is when he "produced his greatest amount of imaginative prose." 21. See Viktor Shklovskii, "Potolok Evgeniia Zamiatina," in Piat chelovek znakomykh (Tiflis: Zakkniga, 1927), 43-67. 22. Shane (156-57) traces the use of the color pink (and other color imagery) in this and other works. See also Carl R. Proffer, “Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin’s We," SEEJ, 7 (1963), 269-78.

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23. See Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1957), 20-24. 24. Panorama de littérature russe (Paris, 1929), 320. 25. Richard Gregg has traced a similar mythic pattern in We, Slavic Review, 24 (1965), 680-87.

ZAMYATIN AND LITERARY MODERNISM Susan Layton

Zamyatin’s art offers strong evidence in support of the proposition that the roots of the complex phenomenon of Russian Modernism are located in nineteenth-century Russian culture. In examining the con­ nections between Zamyatin’s "new Realism” and this culture, valuable perspectives are provided by his aesthetic of distortion, his view of man as essentially irrational, and his concern for the human condition—characteristics which also link his work to tendencies in the international Modernist movement. Zamyatin's art belongs to the first wave of Modernism, a reaction against nineteenth-century traditions which peaked between 1910 and 1925.1 He set forth his aesthetic creed most forcefully in his famous essay “On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy,” a polemical statement of the Modernist outlook reminiscent of the literary manifestos which had proliferated in Russia prior to World War I.2 In it Zamyatin aligned himself with many twentieth-century artists by rebelling against estab­ lished canons and exalting the innovator. He defined “genuinely revolu­ tionary literature” as a phenomenon of Sturm-und-Drang periods in cultural history and glorified the heretics, the romantics who leap into the future. Specifically rejecting photographically accurate Realism, he participated in a basic tendency in modern art by arguing that deforma­ tion and distortion surpass mimesis in creating a more truthful, com­ plete representation of authentic reality.3 As a typical Modernist, Zamyatin defended his aesthetic by insist­ ing that an artist cannot approximate twentieth-century life by repre­ senting surface reality. He considered Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity the symbolic keynote of the age, remarking that even before this scientific confirmation artists and philosophers had intuited the nonexistence of objective reality and absolute truths. In the age of relativity life itself posed a challenge to the artist’s imagination; the strange and fantastic had invaded daily life so that “today the Apocaly­ pse might be announced in the morning paper.” Was it not clear, he asked, that the art which arises from this modern reality must be "fantastic like a dream”?4 This was particularly true for Russia, which

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had become “more fantastic than the countries of modern Europe.” Zamyatin believed his own novel We, Aleksei Tolstoi’s Aèlita, and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Julio Jurenito and Trust D. E. represented favorable begin­ nings in creating a new Realism (“Gerbert Uells,” 105-08), not “primitive” like the old, but characterized by “displacement, distortion, curvature, nonobjectivity.” He enumerates some of the stylistic techni­ ques which he himself employed to displace the surface phenomena of daily life, which he believed could convey the fast pace and the fragmented, complex quality of modern life. The old, slow, soporific descriptions are no more: laconicism—but every word supercharged, high voltage. Into one second must be compressed what formerly went into a sixty-second minute; syntax becomes elliptical, quick, the complicated pyramids of periods are dismantled into the single stones of independent clauses. In the swift movement the canonical, the habitual escapes the eye; the result: unusual, often strange symbolism and diction. The image is sharp, synthetic, it contains only one basic feature, the kind you can catch from a moving automobile. The lexicon hallowed by custom has been invaded by provincialisms, neologisms, science, mathematics, technology.5

The style Zamyatin was defending here is most characteristic of his work during the period 1917-21. To be sure, some continuity in themes and techniques is apparent throughout his career;6 one thinks im­ mediately of the clashes between individuals possessing human spir­ itual potential and societies indifferent or hostile to them, or the use of recurrent impressionistic imagery. However, the works written in the years 1917-21 are notable for their combination of significant elements. Consequently, I will use the novella "The North” and the short stories "Mamai” and “The Cave” as well as We to illustrate my general observations about Zamyatin’s new Realism. Despite differences of genre all four works reflect Zamyatin’s desire to depart from traditional Realism and to create a fictional world remote in time and space.7 He made “The North” resemble a fairy tale, in "Mamai” and "The Cave” he created literary grotesques, and in We he adopted the conventions of utopian fiction. In its typically Modern deformation of the actual, Zamyatin’s imag­ ery tended to annul direct reference to the external world.8 Rather than presenting careful descriptions of characters, he conveyed their appearance through the intensification of one or two features, often to the point of the grotesque: the bald Mamai has a head like a pumpkin; the sickly, thin Masha in "The Cave” is flat, cut out of paper. Frequently the recurrent image is realized: Kortoma in "The North” becomes a copper samovar; Obertyshev in “The Cave" becomes a monster over­

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grown with teeth. As in We, Zamyatin sometimes carries metonymic representation to an extreme, reducing characters to pure lines and geometrical shapes as in a cubist painting.9 Like many modern painters he employs color abstractly (in “The North,” for example, Pelka is often visible only as a flash of red). Such techniques produce a radical meta­ morphosis of the actual in order to reveal the reality Zamyatin perceived beneath the surface. Characterization by leitmotifs rather than by full, individualized de­ scriptions is related to Zamyatin’s retreat from Realism's traditional exhaustive psychological analysis; in this he participated in a main current of literary Modernism. Rather than depicting characters through lengthy analyses of their social relationships and motivations, he pre­ sented fundamental "contours” (Novyi zhurnal, 77 [Sept. 1964], 111). Often this led him to represent them as persons whose typical experi­ ences recur. In “The North” Marei’s nature as a dreamer is revealed in his recollected response to the magical singing of the rusalki, just as it is in his captivation as an adult by a fascinating woman and a fantastic imaginary lantern. In "Mamai” the ludicrous hero is constantly ex­ periencing his past anew: books replace boyhood games, and he fol­ lows conventional codes just as he once submitted to parental supervision. D-503 in We relives experiences from his childhood, and he recognizes new meaning in them as his sense of individuality develops. Importantly, each of these characters illustrates another fea­ ture which Zamyatin's work shares with other works of modern litera­ ture (although in a caricatured form in “Mamai”). This rejection of Realistic psychology depends upon replacing the idea of a stable, knowable ego, a “social being,” with a notion of a deeper “individual being.”10 Rather than being defined conclusively, Zamyatin’s heroes are in the process of becoming, seeking sources of authenticity in existence. D-503 seeks to overcome a sense of alienation from himself and from others and to define his true self. “The North" and "The Cave” also have heroes who attempt to make life meaningful in the absence of support from religion or from society. Like D-503, Marei and Martin Martinych make choices which assert the primacy of feeling over reason, and they experience love and the beauty of the world as abso­ lute goods. As a caricature at the farthest remove from the human ideal, Mamai also points to this concept of the man “genuinely alive”11 and creating himself. In realizing the essential individual being, the touch­ stone for Zamyatin’s characters is love. In “The North” the peak of happiness for Marei and Pelka is their brief existence together in a forest world which seems magically exempt from the ravages of time. Similarly, in “The Cave" Martin Martinych is overwhelmed by the harsh

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conditions of Soviet Petersburg and attempts to retrieve the quality of a past experience, identifying his authentic self with an enduring memory of love. And love for I-330 marks the high point in D-503’s attempt to define his essential self. In each case love provides an epiphany and seems to negate the passage of time, decay, and death. Zamyatin celebrated man’s fundamentally irrational nature, an ess­ ence which transcends individual existence. In his view, passionate love, the impulse toward creation, and an awareness of beauty are human qualities which must always be defended; representing this uni­ versal human nature rather than recording topical events was the aim he ascribed to genuine art.12 Thus his characters participate in undying patterns of human experience. In blurring distinctions between past, present, and future periods of history Zamyatin expressed the idea of eternal recurrence.13 By depicting in “The North” Marei’s experience of love and attempt to create something enduring, Zamyatin revealed in the present age a persistent, primitive sense of harmony with the natu­ ral cosmos. In a different manner We also touches on this theme. The areas separated by the Green Wall have psychological as well as his­ torical significance: the area outside the wall points to the essential irrationality of man and juxtaposes a prehistorical anarchy with the nightmarish city of the future, an extrapolation from contemporary political, social, and technological developments in the Soviet Union. This thematic conflict in We is not limited to these opposing images. As the uniformed citizens of the Single State march in formation through the streets during the morning walk, they look like Assyrian warriors; rebellion against this state in the remote future is illuminated by the ancient myth of Eden, which treats a universal problem of human freedom. "Mamai” and "The Cave” display a similar intersection of historical planes. The battle of Kulikovo, the imperial age of St. Petersburg, the Russo-Japanese war, and the civil war in the Soviet Union all enter the world of Mamai, along with the timeless feats of the imaginary knight Ruslan. In "The Cave” the prehistoric ice age and the Biblical myth of creation provide perspectives on the life of Martin Martinych and his wife in the Petersburg of 1919. By fusing such discon­ tinuous elements into a timeless unity, Zamyatin sought to escape the confines of contemporary history to deal with the human condition. What links can now be established between the Modernist tenden­ cies in which Zamyatin participated and the nineteenth-century Russian heritage? His essay “On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy” was a definitive expression of the Modernists’ sense that they were making a new beginning by breaking with the nineteenth century, a phenomenon observable throughout Western Europe. This cast of mind in Russian

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Modernism is related to the wide-spread nineteenth-century perception of a cultural void. First formulated in the 1830s by Petr Chaadaev, the notion that Russia had no venerable tradition continued to figure in the thinking of intellectuals and artists throughout the century. Surveying Russia’s past in his influential “First Philosophical Letter,” Chaadaev concluded that his country had no genuine history; in contrast to the countries of Europe, he saw no "admirable linking of ideas throughout the passing centuries." Unmotivated by any vital principle, the Russian people were living "in the most narrow present, without a past or a future.”14 However, this sterile past led Chaadaev to speculate optimis­ tically about developments to come, especially in his “Apology of a Madman"; he was the first Russian to perceive the absence of a body of tradition as a positive condition, because it left the way open to original­ ity and innovation. Considering Russia's past, he was awed by the void which he saw because its potential seemed unlimited. His country appeared to exist "to provide some great lesson for the world,”15 and precisely because Russia was unencumbered by tradition, he main­ tained she could advance all the more rapidly. Chaadaev’s notion that a backward country has a youthful vitality reflected the pervasive influence of German Romantic philosophy in early nineteenth-century Russia,16 but his idea outlived its source. In the political arena Russians of very different persuasions embraced the idea that their country's backwardness vis-à-vis the West conferred a unique potential upon it. Focusing upon the distinctiveness of the obshchina, Herzen maintained that Russia, a “young" country, pre­ sented far more favorable conditions for a true socialist revolution than did Europe. Similarly, Russia appeared to Dostoevsky as being capable of rejuvenating the world by offering a new religious truth.17 But a more directly relevant product of the notion that a cultural void opens the way to originality can be observed in the conviction of major nineteenth-century Russian writers that they could not uncritically bor­ row literary forms characteristic of Western Europe. Tolstoi discussed this tendency in commenting upon War and Peace in 1868; he main­ tained the work was not a novel, a poem, or a historical chronicle, but a unique form which allowed him to express what he had wanted to. He saw in this disregard for conventional form a distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century Russian literature: “The history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin affords not merely numerous examples of such deviation from European forms, it offers not a single example to the contrary. From Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, in the recent period of Russian literature there is not a single artistic prose work rising at all above mediocrity which quite fits into the

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form of a novel, poem, or novella.”18 Other artists who articulated the belief that Western literary forms were inadequate for their intentions were Goncharov and Saltykov-Shchedrin.19 In particular this con­ sciousness of the need to innovate forms for expressing truth from a Russian perspective was notable in Dostoevsky’s discussion of his art.20 Zamyatin, with a stridency fostered by the period in which he lived, expressed an innovative zeal similar to his predecessors, although he was reacting against the tradition they established. Another correspondence between the avant-garde of the twenties and the educated class in nineteenth-century Russia was their position as outsiders in their societies. Dostoevsky’s underground man was speaking with paralyzing self-consciousness when he proclaimed,”! have no foundations”; but his sense of being without roots was not aberrant in Russia. The superfluous man of the nineteenth century was the Russian prototype of the homeless intellectual, a sensitive person in opposition to society. In his dilemmas lay seeds of the fateful rift which developed later between artist and society not only in Russia but throughout Europe, where the avant-garde emerged as a special caste.21 As an internal émigré and eventual exile, Zamyatin shared this fate. The case of Chaadaev underlines the force of this parallel be­ tween the modern artist and educated Russians during the last century. Chaadaev was declared a madman (an outsider) by his society. Aware of the personal conflicts experienced by educated Russians like himself, Chaadaev was concerned in his philosophical writings with the condition of homelessness; he saw it writ large as well in his country’s history, perceiving no place for Russia among the family of nations. On the basis of such considerations, Mandelshtam, Zamyatin’s contempor­ ary who was also preoccupied with relating the past to the present age, declared that Chaadaev had a message for posterity,22 in the nineteenth century his concerns had prefigured the sense of discon­ tinuity which is strikingly revealed in modern art. Both in his theoretical statements and prose, Zamyatin sought to establish continuity between past, present, and future on the personal and historical levels by focusing on the human condition. This was in essence a quest for philosophical meaning, which linked him directly with much of nineteenth-century Russian literature. In calling for an art of distortion which could achieve a philosophical synthesis, he revealed his kinship with other Modernists. But his rejection of traditional Realism also identified him with a broad tendency in the works of many nineteenth-century Russian writers which distinguished them from the mainstream of Western European Realism. It has been argued that the masters of Russian Realism worked on the assumption that genuine art

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must have what Lev Shestov called second sight, in order to perceive a human dimension which is inaccessible to the lens of the camera.23 Within this context, the most crucial heritage for Zamyatin was the "Romantic Realism” of Gogol’ and Dostoevsky,24 it affected his struc­ tures and themes, character types, and stylistic techniques. The dense verbal texture of Zamyatin’s works, his use of grotesque imagery, and his pronounced affinity for synecdoche and realized metaphors reveal the impact of Gogol’. But in its fundamental aesthetic strategy and intention, Zamyatin’s art finds a striking parallel, indeed a model, in Dostoevsky’s “fantastic Realism.”25 When Zamyatin maintained that his new Realism best corres­ ponded to the fantastic quality of contemporary life, he was following a line of thought which Dostoevsky had taken in his own time. By em­ ploying the symbolic and the fantastic, Zamyatin aspired like Dostoevs­ ky to reveal a reality more authentic than historical fact. Although Zamyatin was committed to the quest for new forms of expression, he never considered art as the sum of its devices, maintaining instead that it must have affective significance. Opposed to the “dehumanization of art,” he defended literature as a forum for philosophical speculation, thereby placing himself among modern writers who have believed they must undertake tasks traditionally performed by philosophers.26 He felt his relationship with Dostoevsky in this respect: discussing his own desire to deal not with "everyday life” (byt) but with the "realities of being” (bytie), he called the nineteenth-century Russian artist one of the “boldest philosophers” of the past. (“Novaia russkaia proza,” 203). These two Russian artists held very different beliefs, of course, Dos­ toevsky affirming Orthodoxy and Zamyatin denying all absolutes and seeking a synthesis in the passionately alive individual. But in adopting styles which fused the realistic and the symbolic, they both aimed at achieving a philosophical synthesis transcending the particulars of life in a given time and place. They both explored the problem of human freedom, maintaining that human nature is essentially irrational. And despite the intensive analysis of motivation in Dostoevsky’s novels, a conception of personality as a repository of mystery informs both artists’ work. Focusing on the inner life and showing characters in tormented explorations of the self, Dostoevsky’s work prefigured the modern writer’s rejection of the stable, knowable ego.27 Dostoevsky’s art focuses the role of the national heritage in Rus­ sian Modernism as it was represented by Zamyatin. For all the distinctly modern tenor of Dostoevsky’s ideas, we must also consider the sources and nature of his aesthetic discussed above in order to under­ stand fully the notion that the "twentieth century was born in

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midnineteenth-century Russia.”28 Because Zamyatin was both in the mainstream of the literature of his time and heavily influenced by Dostoevsky’s ideas and aesthetic, his work helps in identifying the historical roots of Russian Modernism.

Notes

1. Frank Kermode has labeled this “paleomodernism” to distinguish it from the “neomodernism" which began with Dada and is characterized mainly by its antiformalism. “Modernisms," Continuities (London, 1968), 10-14. 2. Zamyatin first discussed his “Neorealism" publicly in 1918 in "Sovremennaia russkaia literature," Grani, 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1956), 90-101. Another extensive statement of his aesthetic creed is “0 sintetizme" (1922), which appears along with “O literature, revoliutsii i èntropii” (1924) in Litsa (New York: Chekhov, 1955). Unless otherwise indicated, references to Zamyatin’s essays are to this volume. ' 3. “0 literature, revoliutsii i èntropii," 254. For general discussions of Realism and Neorealism see Roman Jakoson, “O khudozhestvennom realizme,” in Ladislav Matejka, comp., Readings in Russian Politics (Michigan Slavic Materials, 2; Ann Arbor: Univ, of Michigan Dept, of Slavic Langs. & Lits., 1962), 31-34; Harry Levin, “What is Realism?" Comparative Literature, 3 (1951), 195; and Stephen Spender, The New Realism: A Discussion (London, 1939), 17. 4. “O sintetizme," 237-38. For discussions of the Modernists’ feeling of embarking upon a radically new era see Irving Howe, Literary Modernism (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1967), 15-16, and Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?” Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York, 1966), 286. 5. "0 literature, revoliutsii i èntropii," p. 255. Elsewhere Zamyatin calls some of these features impressionistic: "Sovremennaia russkaia literature," 98-100. 6. Cf. Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley, 1968), 165-66, 180-81, 205-06. 7. Cf. Johannes Holthusen, Russische Gegenwartsliteratur, vol. 1, 1890-1940 (Bern, 1963), 107. 8. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Anchor, A72; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 34. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 197. 9. An especially good analysis of Zamyatin's use of metonymy is given in Hongor Oulanoff, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (SP&R, 44; The Hague, 1966), 116. 10. D. H. Lawrence used these two terms in "John Galsworthy,” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. with introd. Edward D. McDonald (New York, 1936), 540-42. 11. Zamyatin’s phrase from “O literature, revoliutsii i ehtropii,” 253. 12. “Tsel”' (1955; written ca. 1926), 180; “O segodniashnem i o sovremennom” (1924), 213-14, 229-30. 13. For considering Zamyatin’s participation in this broad current of literary Modern­ ism the following works are most helpful: Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern

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Literature," The Wandering Gyre (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), 58-60; José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, trans. James Cleugh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933), 141-43; and Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley, 1963), 80, 91-92. 14. Petr Chaadaev, “Filosofskie pis'ma, pis’mo pervoe," Sochineniia i pis'ma, ed. M. Gershenzon (2 vols.; M.; Put’, 1913-14), II, 111-12. 15. Ibid., II, 109. See also his "Apologiia sumashedshego," II, 215, 227. 16. See P. Sakulin, Izistoriirusskogo idealizma (M.:M. Sabashnikov, 1913), 613-14. 17. Cf. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), 397-406, and Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, 1966), 56. 18. Lev Tolstoi, “Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi 'Voina i mir,”' Russkii arkiv, 6 (1868), 515. 19. Renato Poggioli, "Realism in Russia," Comparative Literature, 3 (1951), 260. 20. See Jackson, 95, and Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans, with introd. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, 1967), 497. 21. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 53-55, 95-100. 22. Osip Mandel’shtam, "Petr Chaadaev,” Sobranie sochinenii (3 vols.; Washington: Mezhdunarodnoe literaturnoe sodruzhestvo, 1964—69), II, 327-38. 23. Poggioli, “Realism in Russia," 266. 24. See Donald Fänger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 27; Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 101-03, 125-26. 25. See Jackson, 71-73, and J. van der Eng, Dostoevskij romancier: Rapports entre sa vision du monde et ses procédés littéraires (SP&R, 13; The Hague, 1957), 44-45. 26. Howe, 19; Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs (London, 1935), 222; and Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy: The French Example (London, 1957); 36-37. 27. Fänger, 264-06, and Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal No: Death and the Mod­ ern Imagination (Princeton, 1964), 491. 28. Mihajlo Mihajlov, "Russian Modernism," Russian Themes, trans. Marija Mihajlov (New York, 1968), 264.

ANCIENT AND MODERN MATHEMATICS IN ZAMYATIN’S WE Leighton Brett Cooke

God eternally geometricizes. Plato

In the introduction to his Mathematics in Western Culture, Morris Kline advances the notion that the state of mathematical thought in a given period is a dependable index of the cultural vitality of the civiliza­ tion which nourishes it.1 Like the arts, mathematics not only benefits from the liberation of human nature but itself often serves as an act of liberation. [Kline, 1953, 10-12.] Such thinking well accords with a mathematically informed reading of Evgeny Zamyatin’s We. This antiutopian novel uses both mathematical concepts and the history of mathematics as bases for evaluating the dangers posed for human nature by the Single State. Like its derivatives, science and technology, mathematics can be misused as a means of establishing totalitarian control and repressing the human spirit. But Zamyatin’s novel also reminds us that mathematics and reason, in their proper use, are ex­ tremely powerful tools for productive thought; as such, they are inimical to fixed dogma and, as integral parts of human nature, are ultimately irrepressible. Zamyatin’s essays often cite the work of such mathema­ tical geniuses as Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and Albert Einstein as models for creative behavior on the part of artists. He notes mathematics’ potential for shattering common perceptual sets and for bringing us to a better understanding of reality and a greater degree of self-expression. Indeed, he followed his own prescription in We with a unique blend of art and mathematics both to suggest a creative direc­ tion for human endeavors and to warn of the danger of failing to take the path of unceasing inquiry. Many commentators have noted how the mathematical imagery in We contributes to the local setting, a utopian society a thousand years in the future. Some scholars have decoded various concepts to reveal their ethical, social and political significance.2 Nevertheless, we need to take a comprehensive view of all the mathematical references, for the 149

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great mass of mathematical terms found in the novel, when set against the historical development of mathematical thought, communicates an authorial vision of great significance in terms of psychology, perception and epistemology. More than the other symbolic patterns which have been traced in the novel, mathematics is used by Zamyatin to express his ideal of human mental function and of the appropriate destiny of the human race. Certainly We is replete with mathematical imagery and symbols. On a superficial level, there are two reasons which account for this. One is that the utopian society, the Single State, is founded on arithmetical principles, such as its leaders believe to be the basis for scientific materialism and a rational social order. The city is composed of geometrically simple forms, such as squares, circles, rectangles and their corresponding solids.3 The State’s passion for arithmetic justice is reflected in the near-absolute standardization of all aspects of life. The arithmetic design of the society also dictated the replacement of per­ sonal names with alphanumerics. Furthermore, the major social institu­ tions and cultural monuments express the Single State’s acceptance of arithmetic stability as virtually the only value. Secondly, the Single State is a technologically advanced culture. The buildings are made of glass, as is the Green Wall which protects the city from the outside world, albeit imperfectly. The citizens subsist on synthesized food. Although we will find much reason to doubt the vitality of scientific technological work in the city, the Single State is on the brink of inter-planetary exploration. Such achievements require much more than the ability to count on one’s fingers. There is much talk of mathematics in the society.4 One glimpse we get of education is of a class in mathematics. Characters often refer to mathematical concepts. This is especially true for the narrator, D-503, who is the chief engineer of the city’s first spaceship and, hence, one of its leading mathe­ maticians. D-503 sees the world with the eyes of a mathematician. He describes people as if their faces and bodies were geometrical shapes and he conceptualizes their actions in terms of the "graceful formulas” which might define them.5 [96.] He speaks of moments when he "thinks in formulas” and he provides one example with his postulate that love is a function of death. [32, 117.] All this is characteristic of a man and of a society which can regard an ancient railroad timetable as a great piece of literature. [14] However, the arithmetic design of the constituent parts of the Sin­ gle State and the mathematical indoctrination of its citizens do not suffice to make the utopia mathematically secure, let alone politically stable. The chief threat to the Single State does not come from either an

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anti-mathematical or—we should note this—an anti-rational source. Various statements made by I-330, one of the leaders of the rebellious MEFIS, clearly demonstrate that those who oppose the state have a much deeper understanding of mathematics and its empirical implica­ tions than those who support the state. For all the lip-service it pays to mathematical concepts and great mathematicians, the Single State is mathematically naive and often ignorant. One clue is the names of mathematicians actually mentioned in the text. All are from the distant past, either from the beginnings of mathematics in ancient Greece, Pythagoras and Euclid, or from the revival of the discipline in the Age of Reason, Sir Isaac Newton and Colin MacLaurin [19-20, 21, 83.]6 No names or numbers are cited from the time of the Two Hundred Years War and the founding of the Single State up to the period depicted in the novel. It is as if science and mathematical thought have been large­ ly defunct for the past thousand years and the Single State is wholly dependent on theoretical foundations from other eras and cultures, being unable to produce any of its own.7 The same conclusion is also suggested by the Single State’s failure to complete the Taylor Table of Hourly Activities and to eliminate the mettlesome Personal Hours. Although this should be a simple matter in a totalitarian state, and D-503 expresses the society’s will to complete the absolute standard­ ization of life, he is unable to account for this failure. [15.] Many of D-503’s comments show that the mathematicians of the Single State are familiar with modern mathematical concepts up to and including the discoveries of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Janos Bolyai and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, for he mentions such concepts as cal­ culus asymptotes, n-dimensional spaces, multiple unknowns, transfinite numbers and non-Euclidean geometries. However, the ideologists of the Single State, to judge by D-503’s statements, are only comfort­ able with simple notions, such as were developed at the beginning of mathematics. These include the four rules of arithmetic, integers, straight lines, circles, geometrical solids, and Euclidean geometry in general, especially in terms of two-dimensional spaces. Evidently, more advanced notions are considered to be threatening and, consequently, are largely ignored. Indeed, one of the chief plot concerns is D-503’s developing awareness of the implications of the knowledge he has always had available to him. Notably, the rebellious MEFIS are very well versed in such ad­ vanced concepts as transfinite numbers, infinite functions and n-dimensional spaces. Indeed, I-330 refers to these concepts to justify their revolt—which, as a result, should not be construed to be anti-rational. Rather, she seems to wish to liberate mathematical

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thought, the most powerful and efficient tool for logical induction, from the bonds improperly placed on it by the obscurantist Single State. Indeed, as Zamyatin noticed in the discoveries of Lobachevsky and Einstein, modern mathematics served to liberate the imagination from the bonds of three-dimensional Euclidean “reality” into a free realm of infinite dimensions and forms.8 We should also note that D-503 associ­ ates such other "advanced" notions as imaginary and complex numbers, curve equations and multiple unknowns with the MEFIS.

The Single State and Pythagoreanism

The problem with the Single State’s naive mathematics is not so much its low level of development as it is the State’s confidence that the four rules of arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division—suffice to account for all phenomena in the universe and, thus, can serve as the theoretical foundations for the entire social enterprise. Both the simplicity of its mathematics and its confusion of mathematical dogma with what amounts to religious devotion demon­ strate a close link between the Single State and the tenets of another matho-cratic society, the ancient school of Pythagoras, which flourished in Southern Italy from the late 6th century B.C. to the middle of the 4th century B.C. The Pythagoreans were a secretive mystical cult which revered arithmetic concepts as keys to the mysteries of the universe. Remem­ bered largely for the Pythagorean Theorem, they exerted a great influ­ ence on Greek philosophy and a continuing one on modern science. With the help of mathematics, they extended the Ionian concepts of universal laws of nature and, hence, an ordered cosmos. The abstract study of mathematics began with their assumption that “all natural phenomena and all social or ethical concepts were in essence just whole numbers or relationships among whole numbers.” [Kline, 1967, 60.] Mathematics was henceforth regarded as the most accurate and dependable tool for revealing essential truths, since it was believed that, as Anaxagoras stated, “Reason rules the world." [Kline, 1967, 188.] This was true not just for Plato and Euclid but also for seventeenth-century mathematicians like Descartes and Newton. In both eras, God was regarded as a great geometer. Mathematics and science could be practiced as a religious devotion, one of reading the second divine book, nature. However, the epistemological certainty of mathematics was dispelled by the discovery of non-Euclidean geomet­ ries and, later, by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.9

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There is no direct evidence to suggest that Zamyatin intentionally patterned the arithmetic dogma of the Single State after the tenets of Pythagoreanism: indeed, there are points of contrast, such as the State’s scientific materialism and the Pythagorean belief in reincarnation.10 However, Pythagoras and his hypotenuse are men­ tioned in the novel. [19, 81.] Furthermore, there are many similarities between the two societies. The Single State is also organized as if it were a secretive religious cult with knowledge and power in the hands of a select group. D-503 compares the revered Multiplication Table to an "icon,” because it never errs. [14.] He speaks of the divine beauty” of his “algebraic world” and refers to the Jehovah-like “Well-Doer” as the “Number of Numbers.” [59, 33, 123-124.]11 According to one legend, Pythagoras himself claimed semi-divine status: The Pythago­ rean belief in the one-ness of all things, i.e., in a symmetrical, ordered cosmos, is reflected in the geometrically proportioned design of the State, which includes its circular Green Wall, the square grid of the large part of its street plan, the rectangular architecture of its glass buildings and the sixty-six concentric rows in the Square of the Cube.12 Notably, the State attempts to enforce this one-ness by standardizing all activities according to the Taylor Table. D-503 speaks of all citizens washing themselves “mono-millionedly.” [14.] Furthermore, the rigid organization of both groups reflects their thorough opposition to democracy. The Single State's special reverence for the number four may well be traced to the Pythagoreans, who associated it with justice, given that it is the first integer to be the product of equals.14 Notably, when the citizens of the Single State promenade, they do so in orderly rows of four to the “March of the Single State,” producing a spectacle which D-503 describes as “square” or, better, “quadratic harmony.” [8, 9.] This and a poem which D-503 reads on the theme of 2 x 2 = 4 recall Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who associated such a “finalized” equation with the negation of free will.15 Most significantly, both groups base their dogmas on whole numbers, i.e., integers, or on fractions which are relationships between whole numbers. Notably, such fractions as 0.2 = 1/5 are known as “rational numbers.” The Pythagoreans tried to “rationalize” all numeric­ al relationships, including the square root of two, which is unreducible to a fraction and, hence, constitutes an “irrational number.” The Single State shows a similar preference for whole numbers. The letter-number names it gives to each of its citizens always involve whole numbers. It avoids the psychological implications of imaginary and irrational numbers. Furthermore, the Single State builds a space ship called the "Integral” with the intention that the rocket will “integrate" the infinite universe.

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Pythagorian mathematico-religious tenets influenced other aspects of social life, many of which are emulated in the Single State. Pythagorian numerology defined odd numbers as “masculine” and even numbers as "feminine.”16 Notably, the characters in We are num­ bered according to this dichotomy. Meanwhile, D-503 notes that all music in the Single State is composed according to mathematical formulae. [18-19.] Significantly, it was Pythagoras who discovered the numerical relationships between notes in the octave scale. Noting the inverse relationship between the length of a string and its vibrating frequency, i.e., musical pitch, Pythagoras found that the frequency of a given note is precisely twice that of the same note an octave lower—a discovery which would likely apply to the "quadratic harmony” practiced in the Single State. [19-20.]17 Because of its apparent mathematical basis, the Pythagorians used music as a form of psychotherapy to purge the soul. Simple arithmetic and quadratic harmony have much the same effect in the Single State. D-503 solves problems to relax his mind. [36, 38.] He also describes the blank faces of those who are promenading to the "March of the Single State” as not showing any trace of thought. [8.] The most striking parallel between the two groups is their common advocacy of mathematical rules as the basis of social ethics.18 Indeed, the Single State establishes its morality on an even simpler basis than did the Pythagorians, the four rules of arithmetic. [15, 61,93, 100-101.] These purportedly will suffice to ensure eternal and "mathematically-infallible happiness." [5.] Nevertheless, the Single State's de­ finition of what is ethical might strike us as quite exotic. Love is “mathematized.” [22.] D-503 blissfully describes the triangle in which he and R-13 both share sexual access to 0-90, while scornfully disdain­ ing twentieth century notions of exclusive sexual possession. [8.] D-503 wastes no pity on ten workers killed in an accident at the launching pad. He cites an equation to justify his callousness—this we may envision as: Workers killed in accident

Population of Single State

_

10 10,000,000

_

1 100,000,000

According to his reasoning, the workers constitute too infinitesimal a proportion of the total population to warrant his attention. [17, 93.] Else­ where he formulates ethical statements in the form of crude mathema­ tical equations, which we may formulate as

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155

As Envy approaches zero, Envy Happiness goes to infinity.

and as: Freedom = Crime Rate.

If freedom equals zero, so does the crime rate. [23, 34]

Notably, the arithmetic ethics of the Single State are embodied in two of Plato’s solids. First, D-503 describes this morality as a pyramid of justice. [100.] Secondly, that justice is celebrated and enforced at the Square of the Cube.19 The mathematical seeds of destruction are remarkably similar for both societies. The Pythagorian cult of whole numbers was disrupted by their own discovery of irrational numbers. According to tradition, this came about when the Pythagorians attempted to use their famous rule to measure the hypotenuse of a right triangle when the legs each equal a unit of one. They tried in vain to “rationalize” the resultant square root of two units into a whole number fraction. Then they drowned the discoverer, Hippasus of Metapontam. Meanwhile, D-503 is unsettled by the square root of minus one, an imaginary or complex number but, significantly, termed an “irrational term" or “root” in the novel.2°[12, 36.] Frustrated in his effort to reconcile it with integral numbers, he associ­ ates it with I-330 and irrationality, as well with his own developing dissidence. [36] But he cannot deny its existence; the uncomfortable, destabilizing concept impels him onto the path to a mathe­ matically-inspired revolt against the Single State. [151, 87.] The mathematical vulnerability of the Pythagorians and of the Single State to novel mathematical concepts lies in their accepting grossly inadequate and a priori mathematical rules to be the basic laws of the universe. They deceived themselves by their misuse of mathematics. Note how D-503, who is predisposed to see the world in terms of simple geometrical shapes, commonly describes other charac­ ters as squares, circles, triangles, curves and S-shapes. Simple mathematics works as an illusion, one that prevents a direct perception of actuality. Of course, Pythagorian mathematics is vastly preferable to that of the Single State. For all their dogmas, the Pythagorians retained a great spirit of inquiry. On the other hand, the Single State uses a limited arithmetic, tantamount to obscurantism, to exert social control. Such self-deception is only made possible by a thorough insensitivity to the

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real phenomena of the universe: thus the Single State has no true mathematicians loyal to it. Notably, those that do exist are very prone to gross errors in matters of simple calculation. For example, D-503 mis­ calculates the probability of his being assigned to Auditorium 112 by erroneously taking the population of the Single State into account; this we may represent as follows: Number of auditoriums _ 1,500 _ Probability of D-503 ------------------------------------------- being assigned to Total population---------------------- 10,000,000 Auditorium 112. [17]

The correct equation is a simple one of dividing one, the Auditorium 112, by the total number of auditoriums in the Single State, assuming that they are of roughly equal capacity, given the city’s symmetrical design. D-503's auditorium

Number of auditoriums

Probability of D-503 ____________ = being assigned to 1,500______ Auditorium 112.

As for the ten workers killed in the launching pad accident, D-503 miscalculates their portion of the population, ten million, to be one hundred millionth, instead of one millionth.21 [17, 93.] His ensuing com­ ment that this portion constitutes an "infinitesimal of the third order" makes expressive sense but also reveals more loose mathematical calculation. Such a concept is equal to one divided by the cube of infinity, i.e., a much smaller, variable quantity, approaching zero as its limit. A few pages later, he has difficulty calculating whether, if one goes 360 degrees around the world, he would return to his original starting point, puzzling over the possible distinction between +0 degrees and -0 degrees.22 [101.] Earlier, he wonders whether the force of gravity is constant and he speaks of ceaselessly limiting and dividing infinity to make it more palatable. [83, 59.] Indeed, R-13 accuses D-503 of want­ ing to wall-in the infinite. [38.] Thus, there is little wonder that loyal citizens should have trouble with more advanced concepts and speak of integrating infinity, as the State Gazette announces in the first para­ graph of the novel, an absurd notion. [5.] This thinking is reflected in the name of their rocketship, "Integral," which refers to the calculus method for closely limiting what cannot be defined precisely, such as variable quantities and dynamic processes.23 We should note that the ancient Greeks regarded the notions of infinity, formlessness and dynamism with distaste, preferring to see the universe as ordered, finite and static. [Kline, 1953, 56-58.] Lastly, D-503's neighbor miscalculates the mean

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density of an infinite universe to necessarily be zero. He forgets that if space is infinite, matter could also be infinite.24 [198.] Depending on how the concept is defined, infinity divided by infinity can be said to equal infinity or one. More seriously, the proof is miscast; the neighbor says neither how he determined that the average density is not zero nor does he attempt to show how this mathematical abstraction relates to the actuality of the universe.

Modern Mathematics and the MEFIS Zamyatin’s essays repeatedly refer to the revolution in scientific and philosophical thought initiated by Lobachevsky and confirmed in the public mind by Albert Einstein. If the Euclidean three-dimensional geometry was a persuasive illusion, then the discovery of innumerable non-Euclidean geometries constituted a massive case of mathematical and epistemological “ostranenie,” "estrangement,” henceforth, no view of the universe, no perception of essential truth could be accepted as certain.25 Whereas the old mathematics had been the most authorita­ tive test of truth, the new mathematics became the measure of our limitations in determining truths. However, the vast realms opened up for the imagination by non-Euclidean geometries and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity demonstrated how logical induction could outstrip the imagination.26 [Kline, 1967, 476, 553.] By citing these breakthroughs, Zamyatin implicitly exhorted artists to follow the examples set by Lobachevsky and Einstein by breaking the illusion of classical realism and opening the way to the innumerable non-Euclidean spaces to be found in the mind. Furthermore, in the novel, Zamyatin sets this percep­ tual revolution as a model for the revolt to be effected by the MEFIS in the Single State and by mathematical concepts in D-503’s mind. This Zamyatin does by citing various aspects of mathematics which, like non-Euclidean geometries, confound our everyday perception.27 Although the mathematicians of the Single State are familiar with non-Euclidean geometry, for reasons suggested previously, they are reluctant to think about it. The same is true for D-503, who only men­ tions non-Euclidean geometries when unconsciously prompted by one of the MEFIS. The first reference occurs when R-13 enters a room and shifts the furniture into what D-503 describes as a non-Euclidean arrangement. [39.] Later, D-503 is so disturbed by l-330’s transgres­ sions that, while the lines on his two-dimensional paper are parallel, "in another world”—D-503 drops his train of thought, rather than continue to the evident conclusion: in another dimension, these parallel lines

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may intersect.20 [55.] In his essays, Zamyatin links non-Euclidean geometries with infinity and extra-dimensionality. [A Soviet Heretic, 107.] Notably, I-330 evokes thoughts of imaginary numbers in D-503, and these in turn lead him into the non-Euclidean spaces within his psyche.29 [87-88.] Furthermore, D-503 continually gets only fleeting glimpses of S-4711, who pops in and out of sight as if this Guardian and covert member of the MEFIS were a four-dimensional being intruding on D-503’s three-dimensional realm. [20, 53, 59, 75, 77, 122, 136-137, 162-163, 197.] A perceptual acceptance of non-Euclidean space being too great a quantum leap for D-503 to attempt, the MEFIS try to convert him to their cause by appealing to his mathematical reasoning with bits and pieces of the new mathematics. A good example is how I-330 gets him to admit that there is no final number; by analogy, she reasons that there is no final revolution.30 Historical progress has not come to a culmination, as the Single State would have him believe; rather, it will inevitably evolve new social forms, etc.31 Thus, due to his conditioning in the Single State, D-503 is anxious over the possibility that infinity might strike the glass city like a series of meteorites. [111] Another related mathematical concept which I-330 describes to D-503 is that of the infinite spiral. She leads up to this notion but does not actually mention it in her discussion of Galileo’s “mistake." As she explains it, the orbit of the Earth is not a circle but—and here the reader can fill in her ellipsis with the obvious conclusion—an unending spiral.32 [101.] As in D-503’s meditation on Columbus, the Earth may move 360 degrees around the Sun, but it does not return to its starting point, as in 0 degrees = 360 degrees = circle.33 [100-101.]

During the course of a year, the Earth has also moved, along with the rest of the Solar System—to say nothing of the entire galaxy—in yet another dimension. Hence, the Earth comes to a point 0 degrees quite displaced from the original point 0 degrees. Therefore: 0 degrees =/= 0 degrees: a spiral.

One of the fallacies of the Single State is that it constantly represents spiral actions to be circular. This helps to clarify one of the reasons why days cannot be completely standardized according to the Taylor Table. One day may trace a similar pattern of twenty-four hours to that of another, but they are not identical—the passage of yearly time, the seasons, etc., ensures that they are quite different.

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Spirals figure prominently in Zamyatin’s essays where he uses them to represent paths of escape from the “dead circles” of dogma and artistic convention, such as are embodied in the Single State.34 Zamyatin infers that it is a simple matter to escape from a circle: all one has to do is to enter an extra dimension. [A Soviet Heretic, 81,82, 84, 104.] This reasoning holds true for the circular and purportedly im­ penetrable Green Wall: birds fly over it and the MEFIS have a tunnel under it. Meanwhile, D-503’s mental paths of escape are associated and stimulated by processes involving time, which was identified by Einstein as the fourth dimension of his space-time continuum. As with orbital paths, time is described in the novel in terms of spirical motions; furthermore, it is experienced in terms of historical development, sexual generation and memory. D-503 says that “history ascends in circles,” by which he obviously has spirals in mind.35 [101.] Near the end of the novel, anxious to see I-330, he runs up the "endless staircase” of her building, once again, probably spirical in form. [188.] Furthermore, D-503 often associates such extra-dimensionality, be it the fourth dimension, or in two-dimensional contexts, the third—such as Zamyatin links with spirals in his essays—with his subconsciousness, which pre­ serves his memory. [78, 81, 87-88.] All these forms for change are dangerous to the Single State and none can be repressed forever. Indeed, D-503 twice describes himself as a compressed spring: a spiral forced virtually into the shape of a circle. [180, 190.] With the MEFIS upsetting his ordered environment, I-330 and 0-90 appealing to his sexual and reproductive instincts, and mathematical concepts like the square root of minus one stimulating his memory and his desire for making contact with his past, thereby causing him to delve into the infinite expanse of his subconscious, D-503’s mathematically inspired drive for a future of revolutionary changes promises an all but inevitable explosion. His only successful and tangible expression of this is Zamyatin's novel; notably, its author described art as a spiral equation. [A Soviet Heretic, 81, 82.] The novel We is concerned with the uses and abuses of mathematics, insofar as they affect mental functions. The Single State, of course, uses mathematics and other tools to control and ultimately to destroy all but the most basic mental functions. The MEFIS, on the other hand, strive to restore and improve these atrophied and en­ dangered mental functions. Some commentators have noted how the MEFIS work to restore intuition and instinctual drives to mankind in the Single State. However, the MEFIS also strive to restore rational faculties, such as have long been defunct in the Single State.36 Their battle is fought out in the streets of the glass city and in the mind of

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D-503. The MEFIS do seize his mind by rational argument, for D-503 does regain his faculties of mathematical perception and creativity. In the thirty-ninth entry, D-503’s neighbor states that the Single State will prevail because he has proved that the Universe is finite. Thanks to l-330’s tutoring in mathematical argumentation, D-503 crushes this absurd concept with a tart question: And out there, where your finite universe ends? What's out there—further?37 [198.]

Of course, D-503’s victory is only a Pyrrhic one, for he is seized and forced to undergo the operation for removal of his fantasy.30 But the sudden cutting off of D-503’s promising development into a revolu­ tionary is an obvious device for ensuring that the same development will go on in the reader’s mind, carried on by its momentum.39 The reader is impelled in the direction set out for D-503 by the MEFIS, one of continuing mathematically-inspired inquiry and speculation, “further,” ever “further.”

Notes 1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1982 annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Chicago. I wish to thank Peter Schubert, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere and Gerhard Gietz for their suggestions. 2. These include White, 1966, who focuses on the significance of imaginary numbers and infinity in the novel. Edwards, 1982, touches on a variety of mathematical topics, as well as mathematical thinkers, including some speculations as to the derivation of the alphanumeric names of Zamyatin’s characters. Barker, 1977, Borman, 1983, Shane, 1968, 161n, and Warrick, 1975, also try to account for the names, both by reference to possible numerical interrelationships and, in the first two studies, by reference to the Bible. Many other commentators also mention the novel's pervasive mathematical imagery, which, indeed, is difficult to ignore. 3. Both Aldridge, 1977 and Gregg, 1973, trace this symmetry to the Christian view of the New Jerusalem. 4. Carolyn Rhodes says that D-503's unusual lexicon reflects “both his professional training and his values, the ideals of a world of men who aspire to be automatons." [Rhodes, 1976, 33.) 5. All text references to the novel refer to My, New York. 1973, and will be cited by page number only. All translations are my own, although some have been influenced by Bernard Gilbert Guerney's translation, Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, London, 1970. 6. A possible addition to this list is Brook Taylor, an eighteenth century British mathematician. While most of the novel’s references to Taylor, the ideological godfather to the Single State, seem to refer to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American scientist of

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industrial efficiency, Zamyatin might well have had the mathematician Taylor, important in the development of calculus and curve or non-linear equations, in mind when D-503 mentions "Taylor's formulas." [19.] F. W. Taylor used very few formulas and generally confined himself to prose. See Taylor, 1919, 109, and Edwards, 1982, 193-194. 7. That Zamyatin should depict the Single State as being only at the brink of space a thousand years hence probably reflects more his low estimation of the State’s scientific and technological abilities than low expectations on his part for the actual development of rocketry—as Gordon Browning suggests. [Browning, 1968, 18.] After all, by 1919 rockets had already been developed and Zamyatin, more than most people in his time, was acutely aware of the ongoing scientific and mathematical revolution. T. R. N. Edwards also notes the "old-fashioned" scientific/mathematical ideological foundations of the Single State which he says is refuted "partly on the grounds of modern scientific and mathematical theory." [Edwards, 1982, 55-56.] Meanwhile, E. J. Brown finds that the Single State’s "primitive regimention” is an apparent anachronism in combination with the society’s level of educational and technological development, such as would, in all likelihood, presuppose "a sophisticated if not highly moral human community.” [Brown, 1964,34.] These considerations give us some reason to speculate that the Single State is progressively losing its hold on what was once a substantial culture. Indeed, the dramatic events of the novel demonstrate its increasing vulnerability due to this de-evolution. At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that the primitive people living outside the Wall are hardly more creative than the law-abiding inhabitants of the Single State. These primitives do not seem to have contributed any new Einsteins to mankind either. 8. To judge Zamyatin’s essays, he does not appear to give recognition to the claims of Janos Bolyai and Carl Friedrich Gauss to be the founders, or, at least, the co-founders of non-Euclidean geometry. Bolyai had developed his non-Euclidean geometry by 1823, but he published his findings only in 1832. Lobachevsky announced what turned out to be a similar system in 1826 and published a more thorough treatment of the subject in 1829. However, both had been anticipated by Gauss, who apparently developed a non-Euclidean geometry before 1799, but who, fearing a hostile public response, chose not to publish his discovery. There is a continuing controversy as to whether this consti­ tutes a case of what is equivalent to simultaneous discoveries. Because Lobachevsky's and Bolyai’s studies were ignored until Gauss’ notes and letters were published post­ humously in 1855, it is not possible to determine how much information was conveyed along the indirect personal contacts that existed amongst them; Gauss was a friend and colleague of both Bolyai's father and one of Lobachevsky’s teachers. See Kline, 1972, 877-879. 9. Ivan Karamazov notes the effect of non-Euclidean geometries on religious belief in Book 5, Chapters 3 and 4 of The Brothers Karamazov. Meanwhile, we should note that there was some opposition to mathematics, astronomy and physical sciences in early Christianity. [Kline, 1980, 31 ff.] As St. Augustine warned, "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bounds of Hell.” [cited in Kline, 1967, 1.] Quite possibly, this helps account for the derivation of the name for the revolutionaries, MEFIS, given their association with higher mathematics. 10. Zamyatin was familiar with the activities of the school of Pythagoras beyond their mathematical discoveries. For example, in his essay, "On language," Zamyatin also mentions their “theory of the transmigration of souls." [A Soviet Heretic, 176.] Because

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only a few fragmentary texts survive from the heyday of Pythagoreanism, modern scho­ lars are forced to cope with often legendary accounts of Pythagoras and his school. Nevertheless, their continuing influence is based on these legends and not necessarily on fact. With so little evidence available, either about Pythagoras or about Zamyatin's im­ pressions of him and his school, we can only base our comparison of Pythagoreanism and the Single State on what Zamyatin would likely have known from a cursory acquaint­ ance with classical antiquity and appears to have included in his novel. Hence, our comments on Pythagoreanism generally are based on common encyclopedia entries and histories of mathematics. 11. For other religious aspects of the Single State, see Gregg, 1973, Aldridge, 1977, and Borman, 1983. 12. The Pythagorean love of symmetry and proportion is also reflected in D-503’s aesthetic values; presumably, these were inculcated in him and other citizens by educa­ tion in the Single State. He speaks of the “geometric beauty" of the Single State and terms its standardized architecture “divine.” [151, 9.] In a tender moment with 0-90, D-503 speaks of the beauty of the square, the cube and the straight line. [20.] During the open strike at the end of the novel, he mourns—perhaps, prematurely—the destruction of “the greatest and most rational civilization in all history." [197.] Camille R. La Bossiere traces these aesthetics to the “espirit de geometrie” prevalent in the French enlightenment. [La Bossiere, 1973.] Notably, Benjamin Farrington links the Pythagoreans to the beginnings of Greek town planning. [Farrington, 1980, 45.] 13. The Pythagoreans did not regard one as a number "in the full sense,” because, as Morris Kline says, “unity was opposed to quantity." Significantly for our study of the Single State, the Pythagoreans identified the number one with reason, “for reason could produce only a consistent whole." [Kline, 1953, 77.] 14. A cursory review of literature on the history of mathematics suggests that the equation, 2 x 2 = 4, is the most common demonstration of the perceived immutability of arithmetic rules. Indeed, Zamyatin’s Single State and Dostoevsky's Underground Man seize upon it and not some other equation. However, as a description of empirical reality, the equation did not survive the reform of number theory which was conducted during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the very notion of what constitutes a unit was called into question. For example, the addition of two clouds plus two clouds not does not necessarily result in four clouds. Other dramatic results occur with sexual activity and reproduction, as is demonstrated in the novel. Due to D-503’s passion for I-330, he notes how the “two" of them have become “one." [64.] The activities of the four central characters, D-503, 0-90, I-330 and S-4711, culminate in the projected birth of O-90's child. This we might possibly see as an illustration of the Underground Man’s postulate that: 2 x 2 = 5 = “a very sweet little thing” (i.e., free will) [Dostoevsky, 1956-58, IV, 161.] To see a possible rationale to Dostoevsky's equation, we need to recall that each character in We is neither an integer nor a rational number, but, rather, a complex number, one which includes an imaginary component, such as D-503 associates with his psyche; we could represent each character as being equal to 1i. Now, given some scholarly license to delve into pseudomathematics, we could split up these numbers temporarily. First, we could add up the four integers, resulting in a sum of four. Then, if we envision the inter-relationship of the imaginary components as i4, we get a product of one: i4 = (i)(i)(i)(i) =(-1)(-1) = 1 This product, added to the integer equation, would now yield a new sum, five. However, this is hardly a regular procedure in mathematics. 15. For discussion on how Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground influenced

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Zamyatin’s We, including the use of this equation, see Jackson, 1958, Warrick, 1975, and Morson, 1981. 16. Another possible parallel consists in how the Pythagorean "table of ten opposites” suits the conflict between D-503's loyalty to the Single State and I-330. This could be read as a reflection of six of the paired “opposites”: limit—unlimited (i.e., finite—infinite), odd—even (per the characters’ alphanumeric names), male—female, rest—motion (i.e., entropy—energy), straight-curved and good—evil (a possible anticipa­ tion of the ethical values given ironical expression in the novel, as in the struggle between the MEFIS and the Single State with its Guardians). The novel’s antimony of I—WE bears similarity to the “opposite" of one—many, and we could ponder the possible psychoanalytical implications of right—left and light—darkness. However, it is difficult to force square—oblong into this scheme. The Pythagoreans envisioned these dualistic "opposites" as complementary, cohesive forces in their society. While I-330 and her cohorts appear to be divisive, their activities could be interpreted as an attempt to forge these antinomous forces into a new synthesis. She speaks of uniting the two halves of humanity, the citizens of the Single State with the primitives living outside the Green Wall. [140-141.] 17. According to Zamyatin’s memoir on Andrei Bely, the poet regarded music as audible mathematics. [A Soviet Heretic, 243.] Meanwhile, we should note that the Single State's arithmetic aesthetics are extended to other spheres of art. Not only is there the poetic drivel on 2 x 2 = 4, but D-530’s diary is an attempt to write a “graceful and rigid mathematical narrative poem” in praise of the Single State. [89.] 18. Steeped in Pythagorean thought, Plato advocated mathematical training for the leaders of his projected Republic [Kline, 1967, 36.] However, besides Plato and the Pythagoreans, there are other possible antecedents to the Single State's proponents of arithmetical ethics. Patricia Warrick notes how Leibnitz attempted to create such a value system by combining mathematics with law. [Warrick, 1975, 65.] Meanwhile, T. R. N. Edwards sees here intimations of Bentham's "felicific calculus.” [Edwards, 1982, 59.] 19. The association of "square” with "justice” derives from the Pythagorean practice of conceptualizing numbers in geometric arrays of stones. The number four, which they associated with "justice," was represented by a square. See Kline, 1953 77. Quite possibly, this monument is also modelled after the holy Ka’aba (“Cube") in Mecca, which is situated in the middle of a square and worshipped by devout Moslems who surround it in roughly concentric circles. 20. Significantly, D-503’s association of the square root of minus one with his non-rational self is so strong that he uses the adjective, “irratsional’nyi”’ ("irrational”), when the correct modifier is “mnimyi” (“imaginary”), as in the term for an imaginary number, “mnimoe chislo." 21. On only one occasion does D-503 admit his own mathematical fallibility, and this he adduces to l-330's disruptive influence. [46.] 22. Edwards sees this as a false distinction. [Edwards, 1982, 61.] However, it is necessary to take the motion of the Earth into account—as D-503 seems to realize. 23. Sharon M. Carnicke notes the incongruity of the Single State attempting to use calculus "to create a static world." This contrasts with Zamyatin's appropriate use of calculus to describe life processes. [Carnicke, 1983].] 24. In fact, this reflects the Newtonian view of the universe, "an infinitude of stars scattered through infinite Euclidean space." An alternative view was posed during the nineteenth century, one which proposed a finite ’island’ universe, floating “in the immensi­ ties of infinite and 'empty' space." [Clark, 1972, 267.] Indeed there are certain points of similarity between the neighbor’s construct of the universe and that proposed by Einstein

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in 1917. Both men envision a finite, curved universe, and both work in a similar manner, carrying on their speculations into mathematical physics in anticipation of experimental data. However, Einstein’s theory is not at all so simplistic as the neighbor's; furthermore, it only concerned the knowable universe, one which he regarded to be boundless. Due to the influence of gravity, light is not able to escape the stellar universe, rather, it takes a curved path, eventually returning to its source. Meanwhile, this theory had apparent flaws and had to contend with Willem de Sittier's view of an expanding universe, one which is closer to the contemporary consensus in astronomy. Although in 1930, Einstein admitted his miscalculations in the face of accumulating observational data, his theory did help pave the way to contemporary theories, such as the Big Bang. [Clark, 1972, 267-271, 523-526.] 25. In 1921, on the basis of these discoveries, Einstein declared, "So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.” [Cited in Kline, 1967, 473.] Whether or not Zamyatin knew of these remarks—which was quite possible, given the public furor then raging over Einstein and his discoveries—they are certainly antici­ pated in essays like "On Synthetism,” “The New Russian Prose,” and “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters,” where similar ideas are clearly associated with the shattering of conventional perceptual sets. Layton, 1973, and Edwards, 1982, 55, discuss Einstein’s influence on Zamyatin’s aesthetics. 26. Indeed, as George Cantor noted, “The essence of mathematics is freedom." [Cited in Kline, 1967, 474.] Alfred North Whitehead said that, “The science of pure mathematics may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit." [Cited in Kline, 1967, 546.] Of course, it is not uncommon to speak of mathematics as an art, applying such concepts as “symmetry" and "beauty"—as happened with Einstein’s discoveries. Like art, pure mathematics involves a search of sorts for some notion of "truth,” such as would be applicable on a universal scale. A spirit of discovery is com­ bined with self-expression. Furthermore, achievement in mathematics is obtained by the high-order resolution of disparate elements, such as Marshall Bush finds to be an ego-gratifying characteristic of the formal symmetry of a great work of art. [Bush, 1967, 33.] 27. Understandably, Zamyatin does not expect the uninitiated reader to comprehend how Lobachevsky proved that through a point P not on line L more than one line could exist which is parallel to line L that, even when extended infinitely, would never intersect with line L. Non-Euclidean geometries are conceptualized as being somewhat "curved." Meanwhile, Einstein accomplished much the same in physics by dispelling traditional notions of stable “time" and "space," replacing them with the speed of light as the one universal constant, then by describing how the path of light is affected, i.e., bent, by the force of gravity. However, he did this with the help of the elliptic geometry developed by Bernhard Reimann in the mid-nineteenth century, in which all lines intersect, as opposed to the hyperbolic geometry of Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Gauss, which envisages multiple non-intersecting lines, i.e., parallels. Zamyatin admitted that while the world of Euclid is easy to imagine, it is difficult to visualize the world of Einstein. [A Soviet Heretic, 112.] Notably, the aspects of non-Euclidean geometry and Einsteinian space which Zamyatin cites in the novel generally involve curvature, infinity and the displacement of planes—as in the extra-dimensionality of infinite spirals. 28. Although the only non-Euclidean pioneer that Zamyatin mentions in his essays is Lobachevsky, Zamyatin here refers to the elliptic geometry of Reimann, wherein all parallel lines intersect. [A Soviet Heretic, 107.] 29. See fn. 20.

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30. Apparently Zamyatin was quite enamored of this lesson, for he cited it as an epigraph to “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters." [A Soviet Heretic, 107.] 31. Notably, the notion of finite historical time apparently is adopted by the Single State, as I-330 implies with her lesson on the infinity of revolutions. The idea of historical development coming to a halt, when society will reach "perfection,” is also projected both in Marxism and traditional Christianity. 32. In fact, recent developments in astronomy demonstrate that the actual movement of the Earth is much more complex than Zamyatin apparently implied. Not only does the Earth orbit a Sun moving through the Cosmos but the Sun’s path is a spirical orbit around the center of the Milky Way, which is itself moving through the Universe. However, it is apparently too early to determine whether the Milky Way's path is itself a spiral around the presumed center of the Universe. Yet, contemporary astronomers generally agree that the Universe is expanding; hence, the Milky Way's path is at least an infinite one. 33. Of course, it was Columbus who conclusively demonstrated that the Earth is not two-dimensional and bounded but constituted an unbounded three-dimensional sphere. In so doing, he shattered a dogmatic perceptual set in much the same manner as did Lobachevsky and Einstein. Notably, D-503 compares Columbus to a poet and he speaks of his visit beyond the Wall in terms of discovering a new continent. [60, 137, 13.] 34. In announcing the fantasiectomy operations, the State Gazette propounds the value of circular philosophies. [153.] 35. In his essay on Belyi, Zamyatin mentions the latter’s theory of the "spiral movement" of history. [A Soviet Heretic, 244.] 36. Many commentators see the Single State as the embodiment of rationality and the MEFIS as being opposed to rationality, on the premise that, as Robert Louis Jackson says, "man is essentially an irrational being." Jackson, 1958, 151. Also see Jackson, 1958, 154, 157; Layton, 1973, 279, 281,285; Brown, 1964, 37; Brown, 1976, 46; Collins, 1966, 127, 130, 131 ; Collins, 1973, 77; Aldridge, 1977, 74; Hillegas, 105; Lopez-Morillas, 1972, 60-61; Warrick, 1975, 69; Russell, 1973, 45. However, this view of a “mathematically-perfect" society ill accords either with the Single State’s poor work in arithmetic or with the MEFIS’ creative usage of mathematics, the major language of reason. [Warrick, 1975, 67, 69.] Indeed, on this basis Edwards calls the Single State, “one of the least rational of States." [Edwards, 1982, 68.] Given Zamyatin's career as an engineer and as a professor, the pervasive and intricately-developed references to mathematics in the novel, as well as the citation in the essays of Lobachevsky and Einstein as models for creative behavior, it is hardly reasonable to regard Zamyatin as a mathophobe and set him against reason. Indeed, following his common use of Hegelian dialectics, a better reading would be to regard reason and irrationality as thesis and antithesis which will be fused into the synthesis of a properly integrated man. See Shane, 1968, 141; Aldridge, 1977, 74; Miksell and Suggs, 1982, 92; Richards, 1962, 59; Rosenshield, 1979, 62n. 37. For other passages in which D-503 uses mathematics to think in a similarly creative manner, see 88, 101, 116—117, 126. 38. There is disagreement as to D-503's fate. Some commentators claim that D-503 voluntarily submits to the operation to remove his fantasy. See Jackson, 1958, 155; White, 1966, 75; Warrick, 1975, 67, 68, 76; Richards, 1962, 56; Barker, 1977, 552; Gregg, 1973, 208. Jackson, 1958, 155, even claims that by doing this, he "survives his spiritual crisis.” Such a pessimistic reading is difficult to accept, and, to my mind, overplays the weakness of D-503’s “human nature." True, D-503 does go to the Bureau of Guardians with the intention of volunteering himself for the operation. However, intention neither

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constitutes nor represents the totality of his psyche, and we should carefully note what happens afterwards. D-503 encounters S-4711 there and decides to make a confession of his dissident thoughts and activities. He learns that S-4711 is actually a MEFI and, disoriented by the news, he leaves the office, taking refuge in a public lavatory. At this juncture, he has the conversation with his neighbor which apparently includes a sudden turn-about on his part towards independent thought. While Zamyatin never says what D-503 would have done on his own after these developments, his question suggests that D-503 changes his mind with regard to undergoing the operation. Notably, the penulti­ mate entry is broken off with the sound of people running down towards him and in the last entry he explicitly says that he was seized, “vzyali," and taken to an auditorium, where he was strapped to a table and subjected to an operation. [197-199.] This is also noted by Beauchamp, 1973, 292; Beauchamp, 1977, 93; La Bossiere, 1973, 42, and Rosenshield, 1979, 59. Another bone of contention is the fate of the MEFI rebellion. According to some commentators, it is crushed and the Single State emerges victorious, as D-503 predicts in his closing words, "Because reason must conquer.” [200.] See Miksell and Suggs, 1982, 91, 96; Collins, 1966, 127, 131; Richards, 1962, 56; Morson, 1981, 132, 142; Pitcher, 1981, 253; Woodcock, 1956, 88-89, and Parrinder, 1973, 23. However, this is to accept D-503's words as authoritative, an especially doubtful practice after his operation. Notably, he is only predicting a victory for the Single State and he mentions continuing strife and chaos, as well as a temporary barricade which the forces of the Single State have erected in the middle of the city. Obviously, as Jackson, 1958, 156, Brown, 1964,63, and Conners, 1975, 120, 121 have pointed out, the battle is still in progress and the issue is left hanging in the balance at the end of the novel, as Zamyatin denies his reader the security of a conclusion. 39. This device is also noted by Shane, 1968,145, and Miksell and Suggs, 1982, 92.

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Collins, Christopher, 1973, Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study, The Hague. _____ , 1966, “Zamjatin’s We as Myth,” SEEJ, X 2, 125-133. Connors, James, 1975, “Zamyatin’s We and the Genesis of 1984," Modern Fiction Studies, XXI, 1 [Spring], 107-124. Dostoevsky, F. M., 1956-1958, Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh, ed. L. P. Grossman, ef al., Moscow. Edwards, T. R. N., 1982, Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil'nyakand Bulgakov, Cambridge. Farrington, Benjamin, 1980, Greek Science: Its Meaning For Us, Nottingham. Gregg, Richard A., 1983, “Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible and We," in Edward J. Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, London, 202-208. Hillegas, Mark R., 1967, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians, New York. Jackson, R., 1958, “Zamiatin’s We," in his Dostoevskij’s Underground Man in Russian Literature, S’-Gravenhage, 150-157. Kline, Morris, 1953, Mathematics in Western Culture, New York. _____ , 1967, Mathematics for Liberal Arts, Reading, Mass. _____ , 1972, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, New York. _____ , 1980, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, New York. La Bossiere, Camille R., 1973, “Zamiatin’s ‘We’; A Caricature of Utopian Symmetry," Riverside Quarterly, VI, 1 [#21, August], 40-43. Layton, Susan, 1973, “Zamjatin and Literary Modernism,” SEEJ, XVII, 3, 279-287. Lopez-Morillas, Juan, 1972, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia: From ‘Dreams of Reason’ to ‘Dreams of Unreason,"’ Survey, XVIII, 1, Winter, 47-62. Miksell, Margaret Lael and Jon Christian Suggs, 1982, “Zamyatin's We and the Idea of the Dystopie,” Studies in 20th Century Literature, VII, 1 [Fall], 89-102. Morson, Gary Saul, 1981, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia, Austin. Parrinder, Patrick, 1973, "Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells,” Science-Fiction Studies, I, part 1, Spring, 17-26. Pitcher, Edward W. R., 1981, “That Web of Symbols in Zamyatin’s We," Extrapolation, XII, 3 [Fall], 252-261. Rhodes, Carolyn H., 1976, “Frederick Winslow Taylor’s System of Scientific Management in Zamiatin's We, Journal of General Education, XXVIII, 1 [Spring], 31-42. Richards, D.J., 1962, Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic, London. Rosenshield, Gary, 1979, “The Imagination and the T in Zamjatin’s We,” SEEJ, XXIII, 1, 51-62. Russell, Robert, 1973, “Literature and Revolution in Zamyatin’s My," SEER, LI, 122 [January], 36-46. Shane, Alex M., 1968, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, Berkeley. Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 1919, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York. Warrick, Patricia, 1975, “The Sources of Zamyatin’s We in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Extrapolation, XVII, 1 [December], 63-77. White, John J., 1966, “Mathematical Imagery in Musil's Young Torless and Zamyatin’s We,” Comparative Literature, XVIII, 1 [Winter], 71-78. Woodcock, George, 1956, “Utopias in Negative,” Sewanee Review, LXIV, 81-97. Zamyatin, Evgenii, 1960, We, trans, by Bernard Gilbert Guerney, London. _____ , 1970, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, Chicago. _____ , 1973, My, New York [1920 edition].

Influences and Comparisons

A NEGLECTED SOURCE OF ZAMYATIN’S NOVEL “WE” Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor

In their search for the literary and philosophical ancestors of Zamyatin’s novel We, critics have mentioned many names, but it seems none has connected the description of society in the Single State with an essay by Jerome Klapka Jerome, “The New Utopia,” published in 1891 as part of a book entitled Diary of a Pilgrimage (and Six Essays). It is possible that the “Essays" had appeared previously in some journal. The first of the essays is entitled “Dreams” and treats of literary Utopias in general, and of a Utopian world where everything will be done by electricity. Finally, says Jerome, people “will grow to hate electricity.” “The New Utopia” describes the perfect socialist state that came into being after “the great social revolution of 1899.” The hero and narrator of "The New Utopia” falls asleep for one thousand years in 1889 after a succulent dinner at the National Socialist Club. He awakes in 2889 to find that men and women are dressed alike and distinguished only by numbers. People eat, sleep, work, and rest by the bell. Meals are taken in common. There are no private homes and no families. Sex life is strictly regulated, as is the birth rate. The number of children is limited by the needs of the State and children are trained to perform their duties as required. Men with a superior intelli­ gence must undergo a brain operation that brings them to the average level. The first impression of the narrator when he walks with a guide in the streets is that everyone looks like a policeman. The final one is that humanity has been turned into a breed of cattle. It is a short story: 22 pages (with illustrations). Looking to the past, Dostoevsky’s Devils com­ es to mind—but did Jerome read Dostoevsky? Looking forward, it can be seen that Zamyatin has all the features mentioned above in his novel. I am not suggesting plagiarism: in “Dreams” Jerome expresses the conviction that no writer can imagine anything absolutely new. He can only “alter, vary and transpose” and should not be accused of plagiar­ ism if he uses material already used by others. 171

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Jerome was very popular in Russia, mainly as a humorist. Tolstoy noted in his diary in 1904 that he was reading him and strongly dis­ approved of his manner of treating jokingly such sacred matters as goodness, morals, God. Bulgakov mentions Jerome in a sketch, “Psalm,” and seems certain that his readers would guess what story by Jerome he had in mind. He was probably alluding to the same “Six Essays.” There had been at least three editions of Jerome’s collected works in Russian before 1917. I remember reading “The New Utopia” in 1918 in the University Library in Odessa. It probably was in the 1912 edition. When I read We many years later, I remembered Jerome's story, but could not find it because I was searching under "fiction” titles. Once I found it, I decided that it might interest students of Zamyatin and en­ courage people to do more research on the sources of Russian satire in the early twenties. Jerome’s “New Utopia” and the fact expressed in “Dreams” that “ideas are in the air" might also offer an explanation of the similarities between We and Brave New World. A. Huxley insisted that when he wrote Brave New World he was not acquainted with Zamyatin's novel. But both authors may have once read "The Six Essays."

ADDENDUM: THE NEW UTOPIA Jerome K. Jerome

I had spent an extremely interesting evening. I had dined with some very "advanced” friends of mine at the “National Socialist Club.” We had an excellent dinner: the pheasant, stuffed with truffles, was a poem; and when I say that the ’49 Chateau Lafitte was worth the price we had to pay for it, I do not see what more I can add in its favour. After dinner, and over the cigars (I must say they do know how to stock good cigars at the National Socialist Club), we had a very instruc­ tive discussion about the coming equality of man and the nationalisa­ tion of capital. I was not able to take much part in the argument myself, because, having been left when a boy in a position which rendered it necessary for me to earn my living, I have never enjoyed the time and opportunity to study these questions. But I listened very attentively while my friends explained how, for the thousands of centuries during which it had existed before they came, the world had been going on all wrong, and how, in the course of the next few years or so, they meant to put it right. Equality of mankind was their watchword—perfect equality in all things—equality in possessions, and equality in position and influence, and equality in duties, resulting in equality in happiness and contentment. The world belonged to all alike, and must be equally divided. Each man’s labour was the property, not of himself, but of the State which fed and clothed him, and must be applied, not to his own aggrandisement, but to the enrichment of the race. Individual wealth—the social chain with which the few had bound the many, the bandit's pistol by which a small gang of robbers had thieved from the whole community the fruits of its labours—must be taken from the hands that too long had held it. Social distinctions—the barriers by which the rising tide of human­ ity had hitherto been fretted and restrained—must be for ever swept aside. The human race must press onward to its destiny (whatever that might be), not as at present, a scattered horde, scrambling, each man 173

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for himself, over the broken ground of unequal birth and fortune—the soft sward reserved for the feet of the pampered, the cruel stones left for the feet of the cursed,—but an ordered army, marching side by side over the level plain of equity and equality. The great bosom of our Mother Earth should nourish all her children, like and like; none should go hungry, none should have too much. The strong man should not grasp more than the weak; the clever should not scheme to seize more than the simple. The earth was man's, and the fulness thereof; and among all mankind it should be portioned out in even shares. All men were equal by the laws of Nature, and must be made equal by the laws of man. With inequality comes misery, crime, sin, selfishness, arrogance, hypocrisy. In a world in which all men were equal, there would exist no temptation to evil, and our natural nobility would assert itself. When all men were equal, the world would be Heaven—freed from the degrading despotism of God. We raised our glasses and drank to EQUALITY, sacred EQUALITY; and then ordered the waiter to bring us green Chartreuse and more cigars. I went home very thoughtful. I did not go to sleep for a long while; I lay awake; thinking over this vision of a new world that had been pre­ sented to me. How delightful life would be, if only the scheme of my socialist friends could be carried out. There would be no more of this struggling and striving against each other, no more jealousy, no more disappointment, no more fear of poverty! The State would take charge of us from the hour we were born until we died, and provide for all our wants from the cradle to the coffin, both inclusive, and we should need to give no thought even to the matter. There would be no more hard work (three hours’ labour a day would be the limit, according to our calculations, that the State would require from each adult citizen, and nobody would be allowed to do more—I should not be allowed to do more)—no poor to pity, no rich to envy—no one to look down upon us, no one for us to look down upon (not quite so pleasant this latter reflection)—all our life ordered and arranged for us—nothing to think about except the glorious destiny (whatever that might be) of Humanity! Then thought crept away to sport in chaos, and I slept.

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When I awoke, I found myself lying under a glass case, in a high, cheerless room. There was a label over my head; I turned and read it. It ran as follows: "MAN-ASLEEP. "PERIOD—19th CENTURY

"This man was found asleep in a house in London, after the great social revolution of 1899. From the account given by the landlady of the house, it would appear that he had already, when discovered, been asleep for over ten years (she having forgotten to call him). It was decided, for scientific purposes, not to awake him, but to just see how long he would sleep on, and he was accordingly brought and deposited in the 'Museum of Curiosities,’ on February 11th, 1900.”

"Visitors are requested not to squirt water through the air-holes."

An intelligent-looking old gentleman, who had been arranging some stuffed lizards in an adjoining case, came over and took the cover off me. “What's the matter?” he asked; “anything disturbed you?” “No,” I said; “I always wake up like this when I feel I’ve had enough sleep. What century is this?” “This,” he said, “is the twenty-ninth century. You have been asleep just one thousand years.” “Ah! well, I feel all the better for it” I replied, getting down off the table. “There’s nothing like having one’s sleep out.” “I take it you are going to do the usual thing,” said the old gentle­ man to me, as I proceeded to put on my clothes, which had been lying beside me in the case. “You’ll want me to walk round the city with you, and explain all the changes to you, while you ask questions and make silly remarks?" “Yes,” I replied, “I suppose that’s what I ought to do." “I suppose so,” he muttered. “Come on, and let’s get it over,” and he led the way from the room. As we went downstairs, I said: “Well, is it all right, now?” “Is what all right?" he replied. “Why, the world,” I answered. “A few friends of mine were arranging, just before I went to bed, to take it to pieces and fix it up again properly. Have they got it all right by this time? Is everybody equal now, and sin and sorrow and all that sort of thing done away with?” “Oh, yes,” replied my guide; “you’ll find everything all right now. We’ve been working away pretty hard at things while you’ve been

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asleep. We’ve just got this earth about perfect now, I should say. No­ body is allowed to do anything wrong or silly; and as for equality, tadpoles ain’t in it with us.” (He talked in rather a vulgar manner, I thought; but I did not like to reprove him.) We walked out into the city. It was very clean and very quiet. The streets, which were designated by numbers, ran out from each other at right angles, and all presented exactly the same appearance. There were no horses or carriages about; all the traffic was conducted by electric cars. All the people that we met wore a quiet, grave expression, and were so much like each other as to give one the idea that they were all members of the same family. Everyone was dressed, as was also my guide, in a pair of grey trousers, and a grey tunic, buttoning tight round the neck and fastened round the waist by a belt. Each man was clean shaven, and each man had black hair. I said: “Are all these men twins?” “Twins! Good gracious, no!” answered my guide. “Whatever made you fancy that?” “Why, they all look so much alike," I replied; “and they’ve all got black hair!” "Oh; that’s the regulation colour for hair,” explained my companion: “we’ve all got black hair. If a man’s hair is not black naturally, he has to have it dyed black." “Why?” I asked. “Why!” retorted the old gentleman, somewhat irritably. “Why, I thought you understood that all men were now equal. What would become of our equality if one man or woman were allowed to swagger about in golden hair, while another had to put up with carrots? Men have not only got to be equal in these happy days, but to look it, as far as can be. By causing all men to be clean shaven, and all men and women to have black hair cut the same length, we obviate, to a certain extent, the errors of Nature.” I said: "Why black?” He said he did not know, but that was the colour which had been decided upon. "Who by?” I asked. “By THE MAJORITY,” he replied, raising his hat and lowering his eyes, as if in prayer. We talked further, and passed more men. I said: “Are there no women in this city?"

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“Women!” exclaimed my guide. “Of course there are. We’ve passed hundreds of them!” "I thought I knew a woman when I saw one,” I observed; “but I can’t remember noticing any.” "Why, there go two, now,” he said, drawing my attention to a couple of persons near to us, both dressed in the regulation grey trous­ ers and tunics. “How do you know they are women?” I asked. “Why, you see the metal numbers that everybody wears on their collars?” “Yes: I was just thinking what a number of policemen you had, and wondering where the other people were!” “Well, the even numbers are women; the odd numbers are men.” "How very simple,” I remarked. “I suppose after a little practice you can tell one sex from the other almost at a glance?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “if you want to.” We walked on in silence for a while. And then I said: “Why does everybody have a number?” "To distinguish him by,” answered my companion. "Don’t people have names, then?” “No.” "Why?” “Oh! there was so much inequality in names. Some people were called Montmorency, and they looked down on the Smiths; and the Smythes did not like mixing with the Joneses: so, to save further bother, it was decided to abolish names altogether, and to give everybody a number.” "Did not the Montmorency’s and the Smythes object?” “Yes; but the Smiths and Joneses were in THE MAJORITY.” “And did not the Ones and Twos look down upon the Threes and Fours, and so on? “At first, yes. But, with the abolition of wealth, numbers lost their value, except for industrial purposes and for double acrostics, and now No. 100 does not consider himself in any way superior to No. 1,000,000.” I had not washed when I got up, there being no conveniences for doing so in the Museum, and I was beginning to feel somewhat hot and dirty. I said: “Can I wash myself anywhere?” He said: “No; we are not allowed to wash ourselves. You must wait until half-past four, and then you will be washed for tea.”

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"Be washed!" I cried. “Who by?” “The State.” He said that they found they could not maintain their equality when people were allowed to wash themselves. Some people washed three or four times a day, while others never touched soap and water from one year’s end to the other, and in consequence there got to be two distinct classes, the Clean and the Dirty. All the old class prejudices began to be revived. The clean despised the dirty, and the dirty hated the clean. So, to end dissension, the State decided to do the washing itself, and each citizen was now washed twice a day by government-appointed officials; and private washing was prohibited. I noticed that we passed no houses as we went along, only block after block of huge, barrack-like buildings, all of the same size and shape. Occasionally, at a corner, we came across a smaller building, labelled “Museum,” “Hospital,” “Debating Hall,” “Bath,” “Gymnasium,” “Academy of Sciences,” “Exhibition of Industries,” “School of Talk,” &c.; but never a house. I said: “Doesn’t anybody live in this town?” He said: “You do ask silly questions; upon my word, you do. Where do you think they live?” I said: “That’s just what I’ve been trying to think. I don’t see any houses anywhere!” He said: “We don’t need houses—not houses such as you are thinking of. We are socialistic now; we live together in fraternity and equality. We live in these blocks that you see. Each block accommodates one thousand citizens. It contains one thousand beds—one hundred in each room—and bath-rooms and dressing-rooms in proportion, a dining-hall and kitchens. At seven o’clock every morning a bell is rung, and every one rises and tidies up his bed. At seven-thirty they go into the dressing-rooms, and are washed and shaved and have their hair done. At eight o'clock breakfast is served in the dining hall. It comprises a pint of oatmeal porridge and half-a-pint of warm milk for each adult citizen. We are all strict vegetarians now. The vegetarian vote in­ creased enormously during the last century, and their organisation being very perfect, they have been able to dictate every election for the past fifty years. At one o’clock another bell is rung, and the people return to dinner, which consists of beans and stewed fruits, with rolly-polly pudding twice a week, and plum-duff on Saturdays. At five

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o’clock there is tea, and at ten the lights are put out and everybody goes to bed. We are all equal, and we all live alike—clerk and scavenger, tinker and apothecary—all together in fraternity and liberty. The men live in blocks on this side of the town, and the women are at the other end of the city.” “Where are the married people kept?” I asked. "Oh, there are no married couples,” he replied; “we abolished marriage two hundred years ago. You see, married life did not work at all well with our system. Domestic life, we found, was thoroughly anti-socialistic in its tendencies. Men thought more of their wives and families than they did of the State. They wished to labour for the benefit of their little circle of beloved ones rather than for the good of the community. They cared more for the future of their children than for the Destiny of Humanity. The ties of love and blood bound men together fast in little groups instead of in one great whole. Before considering the advancement of the human race, men considered the advancement of their kith and kin. Before striving for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, men strove for the happiness of the few who were near and dear to them. In secret, men and women hoarded up and laboured and denied themselves, so as, in secret, to give some little extra gift of joy to their beloved. Love stirred the vice of ambition in men’s hearts. To win the smiles of the women they loved, to leave a name behind them that their children might be proud to bear, men sought to raise themselves above the general level, to do some deed that should make the world look up to them and honour them above their fellow-men, to press a deeper footprint than another’s upon the dusty highway of the age. The fundamental principles of Socialism were being daily thwarted and contemned. Each house was a revolutionary centre for the propagation of individualism and personality. From the warmth of each domestic hearth grew up the vipers, Comradeship and Independence, to sting the State and poison the minds of men. "The doctrines of equality were openly disputed. Men, when they loved a woman, thought her superior to every other woman, and hardly took any pains to disguise their opinion. Loving wives believed their husbands to be wiser and braver and better than all other men. Mothers laughed at the idea of their children being in no way superior to other children. Children imbibed the hideous heresy that their father and mother were the best father and mother in the world." "From whatever point you looked at it, the Family stood forth as our foe. One man had a charming wife and two sweet-tempered children; his neighbour was married to a shrew, and was the father of eleven noisy, ill-dispositioned brats—where was the equality?"

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"Again, wherever the Family existed, there hovered, ever contending, the angels of Joy and Sorrow; and in a world where joy and sorrow are known, Equality cannot live. One man and woman, in the night, stand weeping beside a little cot. On the other side of the lath-and-plaster, a fair young couple, hand in hand, are laughing at the silly antics of a grave-faced, gurgling baby. What is poor Equality doing? "Such things could not be allowed. Love, we saw, was our enemy at every turn. He made equality impossible. He brought joy and pain, and peace and suffering in his train. He disturbed men’s beliefs, and imperilled the Destiny of Humanity; so we abolished him and all his works. “Now there are not marriages, and, therefore, no domestic troubles; no wooing, therefore, no heartaching; no loving, therefore no sorrowing; no kisses and no tears. “We all live together in equality, free from the troubling of joy or pain.” I said: "It must be very peaceful; but, tell me—I ask the question merely from a scientific standpoint—how do you keep up the supply of men and women?” He said: “Oh, that’s simple enough. How did you, in your day, keep up the supply of horses and cows? In the spring, so many children, according as the State requires, are arranged for, and carefully bred, under medical supervision. When they are born, they are taken away from their mothers (who, else, might grow to love them), and brought up in the public nurseries and schools until they are fourteen. They are then examined by State-appointed inspectors, who decide what calling they shall be brought up to, and to such calling they are thereupon apprenticed. At twenty they take their rank as citizens, and are entitled to a vote. No difference whatever is made between men and women. Both sexes enjoy equal privileges.” I said: “What are the privileges?” He said: “Why, all that I’ve been telling you.” We wandered on for a few more miles, but passed nothing but street after street of these huge blocks. I said: "Are there no shops nor stores in this town?" "No," he replied. "What do we want with shops and stores? The State feeds us, clothes us, houses us, doctors us, washes and dresses

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us, cuts our corns, and buries us. What could we do with shops?” I began to feel tired with our walk. I said: “Can we go in anywhere and have a drink?” He said: “A ‘drink!’ What’s a ’drink’? We have half-a-pint of cocoa with our dinner. Do you mean that?” I did not feel equal to explaining the matter to him, and he evidently would not have understood me if I had; so I said: “Yes; I meant that." We passed a very fine-looking man a little further on, and I noticed that he only had one arm. I had noticed two or three rather big-looking men with only one arm in the course of the morning, and it struck me as curious. I remarked about it to my guide. He said: “Yes; when a man is much above the average size and strength, we clutch one of his legs or arms off, so as to make things more equal; we lop him down a bit, as it were. Nature, you see, is somewhat behind the times; but we do what we can to put her straight.” I said: “I suppose you can't abolish her?” “Well, not altogether," he replied. "We only wish we could. But," he added afterwards, with pardonable pride, “we've done a good deal.” I said: “How about an exceptionally clever man. What do you do with him?" “Well, we are not much troubled in that way now,” he answered. “We have not come across anything dangerous in the shape of brain-power for some very considerable time now. When we do, we perform a surgical operation upon the head, which softens the brain down to the average level.” “I have sometimes thought,” mused the old gentleman,” that it was a pity we could not level up some times, instead of always levelling down; but, of course, that is impossible.” I said: “Do you think it right of you to cut these people up, and tone them down, in this manner?” He said: “Of course, it is right.” “You seem very cock-sure about the matter,” I retorted. “Why is it ‘of course’ right?” “Because it is done by THE MAJORITY.” “How does that make it right?” I asked.

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“A MAJORITY can do no wrong,” he answered. “Oh! is that what the people who are lopped think?" "They!” he replied, evidently astonished at the question. “Oh, they are in the minority, you know.” "Yes; but even the minority has a right to its arms and legs and heads, hasn't it?” "A minority has NO rights,” he answered. I said: “It’s just as well to belong to the Majority, if you’re thinking of living here, isn’t it?" He said: "Yes; most of our people do. They seem to think it more convenient.” I was finding the town somewhat uninteresting, and I asked if we could not go out into the country for a change. My guide said: "Oh, yes, certainly;” but did not think I should care much for it. "Oh! but it used to be so beautiful in the country,” I urged, “before I went to bed. There were great green trees, and grassy, wind-waved meadows, and little rose-decked cottages, and —” "Oh, we’ve changed all that,” interrupted the old gentleman; "it is all one huge market-garden now, divided by roads and canals cut at right angles to each other. There is no beauty in the country now whatever. We have abolished beauty; it interfered with our equality. It was not fair that some people should live among lovely scenery, and others upon barren moors. So we have made it all pretty much alike everywhere now, and no place can lord it over another.” "Can a man emigrate into any other country?” I asked; “it doesn’t matter what country—any other country would do.” "Oh, yes, if he likes,” replied companion; “but why should he? All lands are exactly the same. The whole world is all one people now—one language, one law, one life." "Is there no variety, no change anywhere?" I asked. “What do you do for pleasure, for recreation? Are there any theatres?" "No,” responded my guide. "We had to abolish theatres. The his­ trionic temperament seemed utterly unable to accept the principles of equality. Each actor thought himself the best actor in the world, and superior, in fact, to most other people altogether. I don’t know whether it was the same in your day?” "Exactly the same,” I answered, “but we did not take any notice of it." “Ah! we did,” he replied, "and, in consequence, shut the theatres

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up. Besides, our White Ribbon Vigilance Society said that all places of amusement were vicious and degrading; and being an energetic and stout-winded band, they soon won THE MAJORITY over to their views; and so all amusements are prohibited now.” I said: “Are you allowed to read books?” "Well,” he answered, “there are not many written. You see, owing to our all living such perfect lives, and there being no wrong, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or love, or grief in the world, and everything being so regular and so proper, there is really nothing much to write about—except, of course, the Destiny of Humanity.” "True!” I said, “I see that. But what of the old works, the classics? You had Shakespeare, and Scott, and Thackeray, and there were one or two little things of my own that were not half-bad. What have you done with all those?” “Oh, we have burned all those old works,” he said. “They were full of the old, wrong notions of the old, wrong, wicked times, when men were merely slaves and beasts of burden.” He said all the old paintings and sculptures had been likewise destroyed, partly for that same reason, and partly because they were considered improper by the White Ribbon Vigilance Society, which was a great power now; while all new art and literature were forbidden, as such things tended to undermine the principles of equality. They made men think, and the men that thought grew cleverer than those that did not want to think; and those that did not want to think naturally objected to this, and being in THE MAJORITY, objected to some purpose. He said that, from like considerations, there were no sports or games permitted. Sports and games caused competition, and competi­ tion led to inequality. I said: “How long do your citizens work each day?” "Three hours,” he answered; “after that, all the remainder of the day belongs to ourselves.” "Ah! That is just what I was coming to,” I remarked. “Now, what do you do with yourselves during those other twenty-one hours?” “Oh, we rest.” “What! for the whole twenty-one hours?” “Well, rest and think and talk.” “What do you think and talk about?” “Oh! Oh, about how wretched life must have been in the old times, and about how happy we are now, and—and—oh, and the Destiny of Humanity!” “Don’t you ever get sick of the Destiny of Humanity?”

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“No, not much.” “And what do you understand by it? What /s the Destiny of Humanity, do you think?” “Oh!—why to—to go on being like we are now, only more so—everybody more equal, and more things done by electricity, and everybody to have two votes instead of one, and—” “Thank you. That will do. Is there anything else that you think of? Have you got a religion?" “Oh, yes.” “And you worship a God?” "Oh, yes." “What do you call him?” “THE MAJORITY.” “One question more—You don’t mind my asking you all these questions, by-the-by, do you?” “Oh, no. This is all part of my three hours’ labour for the State.” “Oh, I’m glad of that. I should not like to feel that I was encroaching on your time for rest; but what I wanted to ask was, do many of the people here commit suicide?" "No; such a thing never occurs to them.” I looked at the faces of the men and women that were passing. There was a patient, almost pathetic expression upon them all. I won­ dered where I had seen that look before; it seemed familiar to me. All at once I remembered. It was just the quiet, troubled, wondering expression that I had always noticed upon the faces of the horses and oxen that we used to breed and keep in the old world. No. These people would not think of suicide.

Strange! how very dim and indistinct all the faces are growing around me! And where is my guide? and why am I sitting on the pavement? and—hark! surely that is the voice of Mrs. Biggies, my old landlady. Has she been asleep a thousand years, too? She says it is twelve o-clock—only twelve? and I’m not to be washed till half-past four; and I do feel so stuffy and hot, and my head is aching. Hulloa! why, I’m in bed! Has it all been a dream? And am I back in the nineteenth century? Through the open window I hear the rush and roar of old life’s battle. Men are fighting, striving, working, carving out each man his own life with the sword of strength and will. Men are laughing, grieving,

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loving, doing wrong deeds, doing great deeds,—falling, struggling, helping one another—living! And I have a good deal more than three hours’ work to do to-day, and I meant to be up at seven; and, oh dear! I do wish I had not smoked so many strong cigars last night!

ZAMYATIN’S WE, THE PROLETARIAN POETS; AND BOGDANOV’S RED STAR Kathleen Lewis and Harry Weber

Zamyatin’s brilliant novel We continues to exert a lasting fascination. There have been useful studies on the patterns of imagery in the novel, on the use of Dostoevskian themes, on Biblical myths, and on the work as political statement.1 Source studies have pointed to the works of Tsiolkovsky, and H.G. Wells as antecedents. Jerome K. Jerome’s "The New Utopia,” in particular, has recently been cited as a direct source for certain details in the book.2 Soviet reactions to the novel are nearly non-existent; whatever commentary can be found deals with the book’s political aspects. For example, Gorky is on record as saying that "We is hopelessly bad, a completely sterile thing.” And Voronsky’s extensive essay terms the novel "a lampoon ... not con­ cerned with communism,” adding that "Everything here is untrue.” His opinion was essentially repeated by M. Kuznetsov in New World in 1963.3 This article addresses itself to one vital aspect of the novel which the authors believe has been neglected: the relationship of this novel to the literary milieu of the years immediately following the Revolution, specifically the proletarian poets and Bogdanov’s novel Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda). We believe that Zamyatin parodied the excesses of the proletarian poets through ridicule of their characteristic language and ubiquitous themes. Furthermore, Zamyatin underscores the parody by borrowing the hero and a number of key plot situations from Red Star (1908), written by A.A. Bogdanov, chief theoretician of the Proletkult. The most outspoken expression of Zamyatin’s negative attitude toward the proletarian poets is to be found in his essay "Paradise” (1921),4 in which he inveighs against their meaningless use of hyperbole, inhumane glorification of the instruments of war, intolerance and arrogance, and the urge toward "monophonism” in the new state. Many passages in the novel are identical in tone to verses quoted in Zamyatin’s essay as exemplary of the bad taste or ineffective hyperbole of the new poets. Further, a close reading of the novel reveals clear 186

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echoes of specific themes, poetic cliches, and imagery then current in the endeavors of the proletarians.

I: \Ne and the Proletarian Poets

The most important proletarian poets were V.D. Alexandrovsky, M.P. Gerasimov, A.K. Gastev, V.T. Kirillov, V.V. Knyazev and S.A. Obradovich, who occupied a very prominent position in early Soviet cultural life. Their official organization, the Proletkult, was founded by A.A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky), theoretician on art and the artist, in 1917, and was supported by Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Education. The Proletkult saw as its task the creation and encouragement of new literary and cultural cadres from the ranks of the workers and founded its famous “litstudios” for that purpose. It developed a wide­ spread net of “urban, provincial, district, regional, and factory proletkults, which aimed at leadership, not only of literature, but of all branches of proletarian art. Special sections dealt with the theater, painting, music, workers' clubs, etc. ... in 1919 about 80,000 people took part in the work of the studios.”5 Directives and progress reports were given in nearly twenty Prolet­ kult journals, such as The Forge (Gorn), The Smithy (Kuznitsa), Pro­ letarian Culture (Proletarskaia Kultura), Factory Whistles (Gudki), Create! (Tvoril), The Coming Days (Griadushchee) and the local pro­ letarian organs. The works of the proletarian poets were frequently read at the meetings of the local Proletkult. A review of its activities reports public readings from the works of Gastev and Kirillov on May 1, 1918; and the Moscow Proletkult report for 1919-1921 speaks of perform­ ances by a speaking choir of Kirillov’s “We” and the works of Alexandrovsky.6 The very title of Zamyatin’s We is, as E.J. Brown notes, an ironic reference to the glorification of collectivism by the proletarian poets.7 Kirillov, Gerasimov, Alexandrovsky, and Kraisky wrote poems entitled “We,” and the word occurs as part of the title in the verse of Malyshkin, Malakhov, Samobytnik, and Maznin, as well as in several of Gastev’s poems—“We Grow from Iron,” “We Are Together,” "We Have Encroached,” and “We Are Everywhere.”8 All of this accords with Bogdanov’s view of the function of art as “the most powerful weapon for the organization of collective forces. . . . The former artist saw in his work the expression of his individuality; the new artist will understand and will feel that in him and through him a great whole is creating—the

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collective.”9 And so in Record 1 of We D-503 promises to transcribe "only the things I see, the things I think, or, to be more exact, the things we think.” Zoshchenko’s remark about his own art comes to mind: “The fact is that I am a proletarian writer. Or rather, I am parodying with my things that imaginary, but genuine proletarian writer . . . ”10 Zoshchenko’s erstwhile teacher Zamyatin may well have invented this idea, embodying it in the figure of the mathematician-turned-writer com­ posing paeans to the utopian future which sound suspiciously like the literary products appearing daily in the new Soviet state of 1917-1920. The overall tone of the novel is one of parody, and a closer look at language, themes, and imagery will bear out this view. Zamyatin was extremely careful to use suitable diction and speech proper to the milieu which he was describing, as his essay “On Language” (1919-20) indicates. Propagandistic rhetoric is common in the works of the proletarian poets: Orchestras—louder, banners—higher, Glorify the Great Workers' Union, Glorify the legions of world fighters, The army of blue soiled shirts.

Long live the First of May! May the last ices vanishll Let the whistle blow! Tell the whole world That we will all die or return with victory! "Get up, arise, working people! Your mortal enemy is at the gates!"11

This propagandistic and didactic language is echoed in We, in such lines as “Long live the Well-Doer!!!" (We, Record 1,4), and the "poetry” of the State Poets.12 Demian Bedny is perhaps the clearest representa­ tive of “agit-poetry" and, as Lvov-Rogachevsky says, “In 1920 it might seem that all literature had become Demian Bedny-like.” Paperny de­ scribes Bedny's poetry as dealing with “the most everyday themes—a trait, as we shall see, which is particularly important for the literature of those years.”13 Camilla Gray indicates that artists during this period participated in public agit-displays on hygiene, or even on such topics as “how to breathe."14 This mundane, practical, and edifying subject matter is clearly mocked in We, especially in the titles of literary works: the versified “Mathematical Norms,” “Thorns,” “Daily Odes to the Well-Doer,” “Flowers of Court Sentences,” "the immortal tragedy ‘Those Who Come Late to Work,"’ and “the popular book, ‘Stanzas on Sex Hygiene!'” (We, Record 12, 65).

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Zamyatin also deals with the concept of poetic inspiration. Bogda­ nov himself had once written that “In the sphere of artistic creation the old culture is characterized by the vagueness and unconsciousness of its methods (’inspiration,' etc.).”15 In We (Record 4) the lecturer tells his listeners that their ancestors “could create only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy,” and contrasts this condition with the superior method of cranking out three sonatas an hour on the newly-invented musicometer. One suspects that it was this mechanical quality which led Trotsky to complain: “But weak and, what is more, illiterate poems do not make up proletarian poetry, because they do not make up poetry at all.”16 In Record 12, D-503 tells us that “in the same manner, we domesticated and harnessed the wild element of poetry. Now poetry is no longer the unpardonable whistling of nightingales, but a State Service! Poetry is a commodity” (65). We know from Zamyatin’s own article “I Am Afraid” (1921) that this idea is antithetical to his own that the poet must be a dreamer and a madman. (SH, 57). Zamyatin’s article “Paradise” is useful here, too, because it dis­ plays a satirical tone which is also apparent in We. In the article Zamyatin speaks of a return to the state of paradise—lack of freedom—and says, “There shall be no more polyphony or dissonances. There shall be only majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unanimity . . . And so, it is clearly on this granite foundation of monophony that the new Russian literature and the new poetry are being created ...” After quoting examples from the proleta­ rian poets he continues, ”... hymns are the natural, logical, basic form of paradisiac poetry . . . And the same label prevails as had once pre­ vailed in relation to laldebaoth and the High Personages of earth: We, Ours, All-Blessed, All-Merciful” (SH 61 ). In We, R-13 takes up the same themes (Record 11): “The Well-Doer, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians—all these are good. All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, crystalline, pure . . . how about a little paradisiac­ al poem like that, eh?” (My, 56). The capitalized titles, the similar metaphors (Paradise, hymns), and similarity of diction (“majestic,” “paradisiac”) show the close relationship between the two passages. Another passage in We, the description of the Day of Unanimity—“Even if one supposes the impossible, i.e., some kind of dissonance amid our usual monophony ...” (We, 119)—also indicates the same satiric tone that is openly displayed in “Paradise” and directed specifically against the proletarian poets. We deals in large part with four clusters of motifs: technology, the individual vs. the collective, the “mystery” of labor, and cosmism. Vir­

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tually all the proletarian poems of this period deal with these same motifs, and they vary primarily only in the proportion which each motif occupies in each poem. The most satisfying example of a nearly obses­ sive use of all of these themes is the work of Alexei Gastev (1882-1941), a figure whom Lunacharsky called "perhaps the most outstandingly gifted proletarian poet” and Pletnev termed "the pioneer of proletarian poetry.”17 Gastev's most popular work, "Shockword Poetry," (1918) “was sold out in a short time, it was constantly quoted, referred to, republished.”10 There were six editions in all by 1926. Pertsov also notes that his poems, including the popular “We Grow from Iron,” “Factory,” “Whistles,” “Rails,” and "Tower,” were printed in 1918-19.19 Viktor Nekrasov recalls that as a schoolboy in 1923, the literary studies for the fifth “group" consisted only of Radishchev’s “Journey from Petersburg to Moscow” and Gastev’s "Shockwork Poetry."20 What is most striking is not Gastev’s poetry, however, it is his view of the world of the future, which is as bizarre as some of the elements of Zamyatin’s We. In a statement on proletarian culture writ­ ten in 1919, Gastev speaks of human psychology: The mechanization, not only of gestures, not only of production methods, but of everyday thinking, coupled with extreme rationality, normalizes to a striking degree the psychology of the proletariat. It is this very feature which gives the proletarian psychology a striking anonymity, which allows one to qualify the individual proleta­ rian unit as A, B, C or as 325.075 and 0, etc. . . . The manifestations of such a mechanized collectivism are so alien to personality, so anonymous, that the move­ ment of these collective-complexes approaches the movement of things so that it seems that there is no longer an individual human being, but even, normalized steps, faces without expression, a soul without lyricism, emotion measured not by a cry or a laugh, but my manometer and taxometer... In this psychology, from one end of the world to the other, flow potent massive streams, creating one world head in place of millions of heads. This tendency will next imperceptibly render individual thinking impossible, and thought will become the objective psychic process of a whole class, with systems of psychological switches and locks.21

Gastev’s enthusiastic interest in production processes led him naturally to the works of Frederick W. Taylor, the American efficiency expert, and in the same article for Proletarian Culture, quoted above, the poet attempted a “taylorized” chart of four kinds of workers in the metal-working industry (pp. 38-41). Lunacharsky wrote that Gastev "is heralding the beginning of an epoch of pure technology and, following Taylor’s footsteps, is introducing the idea of subordinating people to mechanisms, of the mechanization of man.22 In the twenties, Gastev was made the director of the Central Institute of Labor (TsIT). Ernst Toller’s bemused account of his visit to Gastev's training workshops in

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1926 is worthy of any scene in We, for Gastev literally practices the mechanization of human beings.23 This mentality is reproduced by Zamyatin in We. D-503 expresses his admiration for Taylor early in the novel, and his thoughts are some­ times reminiscent of Gastev: "Up to now my brain was a chronometri­ cally tested, sparkling mechanism ..." (We, Record 7, 31). Zamyatin develops the same idea in the parable of the Three Forgiven Ones: "for hours they repeated those motions which they had been used to mak­ ing during certain hours of the day and were a requirement of their organism” (We, Record 34, 168). One of the clearest cases of parody of proletarian poetry in We involves the proletarians’ cliche-ridden images of metal, factory, and forge. The motif is monotonously common: We are of iron, or steel ...

... The hammers sing: from morning to night The smiths forge happiness. Long ages forged the steel strength of his steps. Boldly in "The Smithy” we forge Our will, thoughts, feelings: Collectively we create Proletarian art. Beside the forge, lit by a bright-shining fire I forge with a hammer a piece of white-hot steel ... In this world, in this world, you alone created all, Untiringly day and night you forged and forged and forged ... 24

Kirillov apotheosized the “divine” mission of iron in his poem “Zheleznyi Messiia” (1918). But, even more than his fellow poets, it was Gastev who was drawn to metallic images. His poems speak of “iron” choirs, "forged” space, "iron” blood, the "steel” will of labor, and "steel, forged will.”25 Gastev's overuse of such imagery was even parodied by a fellow proletarian poet, Kiselev, who accused him of weighing down his contemporaries with his "iron iambs” and ended, "Oh, how heavy are these iron days!"26 Zamyatin wryly refers to this stock of images in his essay "New Russian Prose” (1923) by saying that in "The Smithy" and "Forge" several poets had been "hammered out" ("vykovalos”). In We, D-503 hears just such an “iron” poem about Prometheus: “(he) harnessed fire

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to steel machine,/And enchained [zakoval] chaos with the Law.” D-503 continues: "Everything is new, steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people . . . One could not have chosen more instructive and beautiful images” (We, Record 9, 43). This is a clear case of parody of proleta­ rian poetry. It is particularly reminiscent of Sadovev’s “conquering dark chaos,/We rule the world collectively” and Gastev’s “Boldly I called to battle dark once-terrible, evil elements: I conquered, tamed, enchained [zakoval] them.”27 Two other favorite images of the proletarians were the railroad engine and the wheel. Gastev, for example, entitled one work "Express” and lines such as the following are common: The insatiable running of wheels is our banner . . . . . . our train rushes on . . . The express rushes on . . .

... the train, bending its back rushing headlong ... 28

In We, D-503 writes in Record 3: “The Tables transformed each one of us, actually, into a six-wheeled steel hero of a great poem” (13). This is clarified by Zamyatin’s remarks elsewhere. In a letter to Yury Annenkov in 1921, he told him in essence about We: “People are greased with machine grease.”29 Again, in “I Am Afraid” he chided, “The proletarian writers and poets are diligently trying to be aviators astride a locomotive. The locomotive huffs and puffs sincerely and assiduously, but it does not look as if it can rise aloft” (SH, 56). Thus the reference in We seems clearly related to the use of an engine as a major motif in proletarian poetry. Gastev’s “manifesto” of 1919, and Lyashko’s statement of 1922, claim the primacy of the collective over the individual, and the image of the one versus the “millions” constantly recurs: “Millions of voices sang these songs to me,/Millions of blue-shirted, strong, bold smiths.”30 These mass activities are particularly striking in Gastev’s “Factory Whistles” (“Gudki”), one of his most popular works, cited in 1918 by Bogdanov as a superior example of proletarian art: When the morning factory whistles blow in the worker's districts, It is no call to bondage. It is the song of the future. Once we worked in miserable workshops and began work in the morning at different times. But now, at eight in the morning, the whistles sound for the whole million.

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Now minute for minute we begin together. The whole million takes the hammer at the very same instant. Our first blows sound together. Of what do the factory whistles sing? They are the morning hymn of unity.31

This prose poem is closely paralleled by a passage in We, in which the ideas of the "million,” or the “million-armed” body, and insistence on perfect simultaneity recur: Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same hour, at the very same minute, we, millions, arise as one. At the very same hour, millions as one, we begin work—millions as one we finish it. And merging into a single, million-armed body, at the very same second, designated by the Tables, we raise the spoons to our mouths, and at the very same second we go out for a walk and go to the auditorium, to the hall of Taylor exercises, and go to sleep. (We, Record 3, 17).

Gastev elevates labor to the status of a divine ritual—"But silence—a sacred moment: we put on our working shirts” (“Miracles of Labor”)32—and his “hymns” to labor find counterparts in the novel’s “hymn of the United State" and the "solemn liturgy for the United State” (Record 9, 42). Proletarian poems are not only hymns, but also triumphal marches: In advance we rejoice and trumpet And we ll begin work with a march of victory ...

With a victory march we’ll drill into the clouds of the dark day ... 33

Zamyatin makes much of this in We: “The pipes of the Music Factory thundered out harmoniously a March—the same daily March” (Record 7, 34). This March recurs frequently: As always, the music factory was playing the March of the United State with all its pipes. With measured steps, by fours, exaltedly keeping time, the numbers walked—hundreds, thousands of numbers, in light-blue units, with gold badges on the chest—the State number of each, male or female. (Record 2, 8).

This passage parodies the victory march, the anonymous masses, the sameness, and particularly the music of machinery which is omnipre­ sent in the verse of the proletarian poets: iron scales, choirs of iron rumbling ...

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by the machines singing songs . . . From the Iron Mont Blanc there came to our working masses the poem raised by us ... the exalted cry of the machine, the triumphant song of forged metal.34

The concept of “cosmism,” or conquering the universe and spreading the revolution to other planets and the stars was developed primarily by the proletarian poets of the Smithy group. Gastev had anticipated them with such lines as: Ever try to forge and forge, ever try to raise and push heavy steel rails into the endless, unknown, mute atmosphere to neighboring, still unknown, strange planets. . . . they will enchain and girdle the universe with swift, strong rails of will.

through the air came a burning poem of metal, a voice was heard, coming from earth through the beams past the clouds to the stars.

This theme is continued by the Smithy poets: We’ll boldly fly up into the sky Like a thunder-roaring comet We’ll slice through Milky Ways.

Cosmic millions, We will plunge ourselves into the old world constellations. In the white star-clusters of Orion We’ll light the fire of insurrection. (Gerasimov, “We shall conquer, the power is simmering," 1918)

and And now we come out in orderly ranks, Victoriously greeting the heights. Participants in a great change .. . And with the songs of the proletariat The paths of the universe will be decked. Fellow-singers, make haste To shape the factory rumble into a hymn. (Ftodov, "Proletarian Poets," 1920)35

Trotsky wrote sarcastically of the Smithy: “The idea here is that one should feel the entire world as a unity and oneself as an active part

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of that unity, with the prospect of commanding in the future not only the earth, but the entire cosmos. All this, of course, is very splendid, and terribly big. We came from Kursk and Kaluga, we have conquered all Russia recently, and now we are going on towards world revolution. But are we to stop at the boundaries of ‘planetism’!”36 The opening page of We is filled with the same theme: “One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of the infinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral" (We, Record 1,3). This passage is surely nothing less than a parody of the proletarian’s idea of cosmic revolution, given an “objective correlative” in We in the projected flight of an actual spacecraft. Zamyatin draws still another parallel to the proletarian poetry in his depictions of the building of the Integral. There is great similarity be­ tween the Taylorized precision of Gastev’s factories and the construc­ tion of the spacecraft: Gastev:

We:

The factory... completely full of its steel, invincible pride, threatens the elements of earth ... sky ... universe and it is hard to understand, where machine is and where man. We have merged with our iron comrades, we have reached an accord with them, together we have cre­ ated a new spirit of movement... 37

I saw how the people below bent, unbent, turned around according to the Taylor system evenly and swiftly, in time, like the levers of one huge machine ... I saw how the transparent-glass monster­ crane rolled slowly along the glass rails, and, just like the people, obediently turned, bent, thrust their loads inward, into the bowels of the Integral. And it was all one: humanized machines, mecha­ nized people. It was the greatest, most stirring beauty, harmony, music ... (We, Record 15, 73).

The “monster” machines appear both in Gastev and in We.30 Machines are humanized in both—the Integral “meditates” on its future (Record 15) and Gastev’s “Express” "wants” to melt small souls to create one large one (PP, 170). Two other passages in We parallel those in “We Grow from Iron”:

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Gastev:

We:

. .. Girders and angle bars .. . Bend to the right and left. The rafters in the domes, like a giant's shoulders, hold the whole iron building.

Obviously, the balls of the regulators rotated, cranks, glittering, bent to the right and left: the beam proudly shook its shoulders . . . (Record 2,7)

I merged with the iron of the building. I rose. I push my shoulders against the rafters, the upper beams, the roof. My feet are still on the earth, but my head is above the building .. . An iron echo covered my words, the whole building trembles with impatience ... 39

And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself had won a vic­ tory over the old god and the old life, that I myself had created all this. I felt like a tower: I was afraid to move my elbow, lest the walls, the cupola, and the machines should fall to pieces. (Record 2, 7).

In these lines one also finds an echo of Gutsevich’s line “In this world, in this world, you alone created all." A few lines before those quoted above from We, Zamyatin's "you rise ever higher into the dizzy blue" parallels Vasily Kazin’s "I rise into the blue heights."40 Finally, one might also point to the ending of We and its note of assurance: "And I hope we shall prevail. More than that. I am sure we shall prevail. Because reason must prevail.” Gastev is equally self-assured at the conclusion of "We Grow from Iron”: "We shall prevail!” In We Zamyatin holds up to ridicule an entire complex of ideas which are intimately connected with the poetry of the proletarians: its emphasis on collectivism, the mechanization of humans, cosmism, the apotheosis of labor and the glorification of the State. And the pages of We also resound with the incessant din of the motifs of metals, forges and locomotives. Zamyatin’s essays show clearly that he was a close reader of the poems produced by this group of poets, and his re-creation of their religious tone and use of their industrial images point persuasively to the proletarians as the targets of some of the satirical shafts of the novel.

II: We and Bogdanov's Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda) Several years ago E.J. Brown made note of the general connec­ tion between We and the proletarian writers, although he made no extensive analysis of this connection. Collins, too, notes this, and sug­

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gests that “We may be regarded as a satire on Wellsian utopia” to some degree.41 There is no doubt that some of the urban setting and tone of the novel were surely suggested by Wells. The first part of this article has tried to show the many links between We and the language and themes of the proletarians. But evidence also suggests that both the hero D-503 and the overall parameters of the novel were inspired by another proletarian work, A.A. Bogdanov’s utopian novel Red Star (1908). The details, themes and images common to both novels are too numerous to be accidental. Zamyatin mentions Bogdanov’s novel in his 1922 article on H.G. Wells as one of the very few examples of science fiction in the Russian tradition.42 His disclaimer that it “has more journa­ listic than literary value” may have been intended to forestall suspicions of any connections between his and Bogdanov’s novels. Bogdanov’s second utopian novel Engineer Menni (1912) also has some relevance to We.43 Red Star, in brief, concerns the visit of an Earthling to the more advanced civilization of Mars. The hero, 27-year-old Leonid, is invited to join an “expedition" by a Martian working in disguise in the ranks of the Russian revolutionaries under the conspirational name of Menni. The purpose of Leonid’s inclusion in the crew of the expedition is to serve as the liaison between the two worlds, to bring them closer together. The trip is marred by one event: an accident in the laboratory of the spacecraft during the journey to Mars pierces the skin of the craft, and a master chemist, Letta, sacrifices his life to save Leonid’s. This incident earns Leonid the hatred of Sterni, Mars’ leading mathematician, who deplores the loss of such a brilliantly-trained mind for the sake of an apparently inferior one. For in spite of his scientific training, Leonid finds himself unable to comprehend many of the tech­ nical achievements which the Martians have made. A series of scenes acquaint Leonid and the reader with the world of the future some 300 years hence: a tour of the eteronef, or spacecraft, Menni’s Martian home, a factory, a children’s home, an art museum, and a hospital. Leonid becomes involved in a love triangle and falls ill in the fruitless attempt to retrain his Earthly mind to function in the Martian world. He becomes seriously unbalanced when he learns by chance of Sterni’s proposal to exterminate Earth’s population, in order to prepare the planet for its colonization by Mars. In a fit of rage Leonid kills the mathematician and is returned to Earth in a kind of coma. He remem­ bers nothing of the return trip and regains consciousness in a hospital in the far north of Russia. But in the last few pages of the novel Leonid escapes from the hospital and goes to the “Mountain region,” where “serious events have now begun” (Preface). At the end of the novel the

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hospital director, Dr. Verner, is sending Leonid’s notes to “litterateur Mirsky” so that they may be published. Verner himself has abandoned his hospital to search for Leonid. In the doctor's opinion, "the object of (Leonid's) flight is an attempt at indirect suicide. It is the result of that same mental illness ...” There are many important parallels between the experiences of Leonid in Red Star and D-503 in We. Consider first Leonid’s character and intellect. Bogdanov portrays Leonid as a scientist interested in the problem of the structure of matter, and a man of letters who writes for the children’s journals (7). Zamyatin depicts D-503 as both engineer and inchoate man of letters. During the trip to Mars, Menni (who turns out to be the captain of the eteronef) explains why Leonid was chosen for this assignment. It was necessary to find someone in “your country where life is moving most energetically and vividly, where people are forced more than elsewhere to look to the future . . . We needed a man whose nature contained as much as possible of health and flexibility, talent for rational labor, as few personal ties on Earth as possible, as little individualism as possible. Our physiologists and psychologists reckoned that the transition from the conditions of life of your society, sharply fragmented by a constant internal struggle, to the conditions of our organized, ‘socialist’ (as you would say), society, that this transition would be very harsh and hard for an individual human and would de­ mand a particularly propitious organization” (29-30). Zamyatin begins his novel in almost identical fashion, with D-503 as the seemingly perfect product of his conditioning in a highly organ­ ized society, an individual with a minimum of individual traits and desires. This proves to be true, for in spite of temporary aberrations, D-503’s ultimate inability to overcome the effects of his conditioning, i.e., his “other self,” is a parallel to Leonid’s discovery later in the novel that he is unable to accustom himself to the Martian way of life. The complex love relationships are extremely important in both novels. In the first chapter of Red Star Leonid tells of his Terrestrial relationship to an Anna Nikolaevna, and of their disagreement on “the subject of love and marriage. Whereas Ann wished one true faithful marriage, (Leonid) even held that polygamy as a principle is higher than monogamy, since it is able to provide people with both a greater rich­ ness of personal life and a greater diversity of combinations in the sphere of inheritance . . . (and) that the future here must bring a pro­ found reformation” (8-9). Eventually Leonid undergoes a transformation. When his inability to master Martian mathematics literally sickens him, a Martian doctor, Netti (also a member of the expedition to Earth), attends him. Neither

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name nor dress are reliable indices of sex, according to the novel, but Leonid had always felt a special attraction to Netti. When Netti admits then, that she is, in fact, a woman, “Lightning flashed before my eyes and everything around me darkened, and my heart literally stopped beating ... In a second, like a madman, I crushed Netti in my embraces and kissed her hands, her face, her large, deep eyes, greenish-blue as the sky of her planet” (89). Netti, in turn, feels Leonid’s “despotism, his egoism, his desperate thirst for happiness—everything was in your (sic) caresses” (89). Their passionate affair is short-lived. Netti is sent to Venus on another extended interplanetary expedition, and Leonid is left behind in the company of Enno, a young astronomer-poet whom he first met on the eteronef. Enno, it turns out, is also a woman who has long been in love with Leonid, and she is only too happy to spend with him the “long winter evenings together in scientific studies, conversations and some­ times in walks in the environs" (97-98). Enno relates that she has once been Menni’s wife and had passionately wished a child from him, but that Menni was unable to father a child. As time passes, “as it were, of itself, without an onrush (of passion) or without struggle, our intimacy led us to a love affair. . . (Enno) simply decided not to have children by me” (99). Shortly afterwards, in speaking with Netti’s mother Nella (a matron in the Children’s Home), Leonid learns that Netti formerly had been the wife of both Letta and Sterni simultaneously. He is profoundly disturbed: “But where does my troubled puzzlement come from and the senseless pain which makes me want either to scream or to laugh? Or am I unable to feel exactly as I think? It seems so. And what of my relations with Enno? Where is my logic there? And just what am I, myself? What a stupid situation!” (103). Leonid mediates on these feelings which seem to arise “under the influence of the moment and of spontaneous forces of the past which always lurk in the depths of the human soul ..." (104). Later in the novel, after the murder of Sterni (104), Leonid’s “I” disappears completely. Leonid and Enno must part, and Enno promises Leonid no other personal entanglements. These passages are quite sufficient to indicate the close parallels between the members of the love triangles in both novels. D/Leonid’s passionate, stormy love for l/Netti is opposed to the calmer, comfort­ able arrangement with O/Enno. Since some attention has been given in the scholarship to the significance of the letter names,44 perhaps it is not too farfetched to point out that Zamyatin may have acknowledged his source by using the last letter of the names of each of Bogdanov’s characters for the "names” of his own, and by arranging them in a

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similar love triangle in We: Netti-Leonid-Enno = l-D-O. Zamyatin surely wished to use the Latin letter “I” rather than the cyrillic “i"; however, in order to underscore the mathematical significance of i as the symbol for irrational numbers, just as the “D" and “O” represent important mathe­ matical concepts, as Shane has pointed out.45 Zamyatin left some of the details intact; for example, like Leonid, D-503 has an irrepressible passion for 1-330 and desires exclusive sexual privileges. On the other hand, Enno’s desire for a child from Menni has been modified slightly to O's desire for a child by D, a change which eliminates a counterpart for the figure of Menni in Zamyatin’s novel. Zamyatin has also reproduced Leonid and Enno’s “scientific studies" in We (Records 4 and 8) by having D and O engage in chit-chat about geometrical figures and constructively solving mathematical problems during the personal hour. We makes much of the importance of the concept of irrationality to D-503 and the trauma he suffered as a boy when he was introduced to the square root of minus 1. Leonid was similarly traumatized as a child by a French mathematics book which tortured him because he “did not have that logical discipline and practice of scientific cogitation . . . ” (93). However, he did understand the concepts of “limit" and “derivative" so difficult for his fellow-students. In We, D-503 functions best when hedged about by limitations. As the records in We advance, D’s feelings of personal ownership of I grow apace, and his original amusement at the bizarre and atavistic ideas of “my” and “mine” is displaced by a terrifying and immediate realization of their existence. A parallel discussion can be found in Red Star, not in connection with Leonid’s love affairs, but at the Children’s Home. In the midst of general play, one of the little Martian girls takes a toy boat and runs away with it. Nella, the Directress, says: “Well, look there, at the strength of the past . . . It would seem that we have complete communism; we almost never have to deny the children anything. Where does this feeling of personal property come from? But here a child comes and declares: “my” boat, "I myself” did it. And this happens very often . . . Nothing can be done. It is a general law of life: the development of the organism repeats on a small scale the development of the species; the development of the individual likewise repeats the development of society.” Nella suggests that perhaps the training of the children in history by means of illus­ trated lectures (obligatory for the city dwellers in We) may be responsible. For the lectures show a world which “awakens with its pictures of struggle and violence vague echoes in the atavistic depths of childish instincts” (63). Nella emphasizes the general “Martian” value system of the enor­ mous faith in the collective and group life. She refuses to consider the

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possibility of a reduction of the birthrate, because it is a betrayal of the faith in collective achievement. If that faith disappears, “The sense of life of each of us will also be lost, because in each of us, little cells of the great organism, there lives the whole, and each lives by means of this whole.” Indeed, each individual wishes to “fuse with this whole, to completely dissolve in it his consciousness and to grasp it with his consciousness” (73). These ideas are recreated in Records 2 and 7 in We: “I see myself as part of an enormous, vigorous, united body,” (32) as well as the “million-armed body” referred to earlier in this essay, in Record 3. And we recall how common the theme is in all the proletarian poets. Both Leonid and D-503 suffer from hallucinations. As Leonid’s in­ tensive and unproductive hours of study lead him to nervous exhaustion, he begins to have both visual and acoustical hallucinations. He has a vision of Anna Nikolaevna which parallels l-330’s appearance to D-503 in Record 18. The difference is minor: Anna Nikolaevna "dissolves in the air” (85), while D-503 screams and awakens himself. Zamyatin seems to have transferred a number of details of Martian civilization to his utopian city. Two of the adjectives characterizing Mar­ tian life and nature, “clear” (“iasnyi”) and "transparent” (“prozrachnyi”), are also used as D-503’s leitmotifs. The material from which Martian clothing is made is transparent, at least until dyed; much of the body of the eteronef is glass; the Martian factory has a glass ceiling and networks of glass parquets supported by iron beams (53); Letta’s casket is transparent (48). Martian houses all have a blue-tinted glass roof, which, as in We, gives their cities, when seen from an approaching spacecraft, the configuration of blue spots on the Martian topography. Martians in this fashion relax with their friends in bluish light, chosen specifically (like the dwellings in We) because of the tran­ quillizing effect of blue light on living organisms (50). We see that Zamyatin has taken many of these details and has made a much more consistent use of them in his anti-utopia than Bogdanov did. Some alterations are obvious. Menni, for example, lives in a small, individual, two-story house, while all the inhabitants of Zamyatin’s city live in com­ munal Crystal Palaces, whose glass, transparent cages stretch in all directions. The light effect—filtered, quieting, even sunlight—is like that in Bogdanov’s Martian parlors. The bird’s eye view of Zamyatin’s city buildings, the blocks of bluish ice, seems closely related to the Martian cities (Record 21) just described: "The icy blue relief map of the city” (Record 34, 184). Zamyatin seems to have borrowed this detail, but has transformed its meaning by subordinating it to his pattern of images (including ice, blue, and squares) which signify entropy.

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Zamyatin’s Utopians are feeding on petroleum food, a detail which may have been suggested by Bogdanov’s novel. Since a food crisis impends, the Martians institute a crash program to produce a food substitute from albumen, and eventually they attempt to manufacture albumen from inorganic material (72 and 123). The first section of this essay has pointed out the frequency with which the proletarian poets treated lyrically the theme of the machine. Bogdanov, too, informs Martian technology with esthetic qualities: at the factory the machines “cut, sawed, planed, drilled the huge pieces of iron, aluminum, nickel, and copper. The levers, like gigantic steel hands, moved evenly and smoothly . . . The very sound of the machines, when the ear became somewhat used to it, began to seem almost melodic . . . ’’ (54). Compare this with the beautiful passage in We which prefaces D-503's meditations on the beauty of the dance as "unfree movement.” Like Bogdanov, Zamyatin personifies the various machines which are working “with closed eyes, in self-forgetfulness,” "bending,” "moving their shoulders,” and "squatting” (We, Record 2, 7). As for the workers themselves, “In the expression of their faces was no tense concern, but only calm attention” (540). We recall that in We, D-503 contentedly records that during the daily march, “our faces are unclouded by the insanity of thoughts” (Record 2, 7). “More intangi­ ble and invisible from the side were those threads which connected the tender brain of people with the indestructible organs of the mechanism” (Red Star, 54-55). Zamyatin also ties humans together with threads: based on his perception of “threads” D-503 suspects relations between I and S, between I and R-13. But then Zamyatin unexpectedly uses the metaphor to reveal a negative aspect of the political hierarchy in the City. He transforms the idea into the grotesque image of the spider web in which they all have been caught and are awaiting the arrival of the spider, the Well-Doer, on the Day of Unanimity (We, Record 24, 121). D-503 is the spokesman for the principle of rationality, a principle which the novel ultimately rejects. Bogdanov, however, makes it the basic axis of the Martian civilization. For example, suicide is permitted because there is no rational reason why it should not be permitted. And so a special room is provided for this purpose for those who have become incurably ill. Force, as a principle, is also permitted. Leonid asks for specifics, but the answer is given with only one example; “What rational being would reject violence, for example, for self-defense?” (76). Leonid finds these values further elucidated in the exhibits at the art museum, and he perceives that the esthetic standards expressed

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there are part of the everyday life in the utopian future. Life and art become one. He sees that the early works of the past express harmony. Art works of the “transitional epochs” express plosion, passion, disturb­ ing struggle; the art of the socialist epoch expresses “harmonious movement, the calm manifestation of strength, of movement alien to the morbidity of effort, striving free of worry, a lively activity permeated with the consciousness of its well-proportioned unity and its unsuperable rationality” (68). Leonid also discovers that on Mars monuments are no longer erected in honor of people; rather they are commissioned to commemo­ rate great events such as the first attempt to reach the Earth; the elimination of a fatal epidemic disease, or the discovery of the break­ down and synthesis of all the chemical elements (70). This reminds us of the occasions on which poetry is composed and recited in We: R-13’s poeticization of the Death Sentence (Record 8, 40). Bogdanov's second novel Engineer Menni (1912), allegedly a se­ quel to Red Star, has far less relevance to We than its predecessor. We are told in the introduction that Leonid is once more “with them,” and that his translation from the Martian into Russian of a historical novel was mysteriously delivered to Leonid’s old friend, Dr. Verner. Engineer Menni illustrates the transition of the economic and social system from capitalism to socialism predicted earlier by the famous Martian eco­ nomist Ksarma. It is essentially a pedestrian novel about the construc­ tion of the famed Martian canals. But Bogdanov’s external futuristic frame seems, so far as we have been able to determine, truly original. Zamyatin borrowed Bogdanov’s idea to say that his “author” D-503 was writing for his ancestors—i.e., the Russians of the 1920s. The plot development of both Bogdanov’s and Zamyatin’s novels seem basically parallel: they concern the futile efforts of a man to retrain his mind. Bogdanov’s hero is an idealistic socialist who finds that he is not equipped intellectually or emotionally to cope with the demands of a more advanced culture. Yet even Bogdanov does not present a com­ plete utopia, for things still “happen” there: the struggle with nature continues; a food crisis is imminent; and there is disagreement about how to live in a pluralistic universe, about whether to coexist peacefully or exterminate one’s planetary neighbors. Leonid becomes profoundly sick and betrays his own principles of logic in the intense jealousy he feels both in his relationship with Netti and in his murder of Sterni. At the end we are told specifically that the Doctor suspects that he is seeking death in the form of “indirect suicide” in the battles in the “Mountain region.” Leonid is betrayed by his humanity, by his Earthly value sys­ tem and his Earthly nature.

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We is essentially a restatement of this plot. D-503 is an enthusias­ tic supporter of the United States, which has yet to "perfect" itself. The personal hours must yet be eliminated, and, on the cosmic front, the Earthlings must face the possibility that they may have to lead recalcit­ rant Venutians and Martians to happiness by force. As D's value sys­ tem is progressively shattered by his excrudescent individualism (his urgent and specific desire for 1-330), he also agonizes over the possibil­ ity that he is seriously ill. The theme of suicide is met repeatedly throughout We; and at the end we see that in the sacrifice of his fancy, D-503 has, indeed, killed the most human part of himself and has been reduced to a mechanism. The differences in the treatment of the same motifs are very important. The love triangle in We is much more satisfying as an esthe­ tic device than it is in Red Star. In Bogdanov’s novel the love theme functions to show Leonid’s human traits, but it is not integrated with the other themes of the novel—e.g., Leonid’s intellectual deficiencies, or the murder of Sterni. Zamyatin, however, used the love theme to trigger the initial temptation to betray the United States, as the catalyst for D’s illness, and finally, in his indifference to the torture and execution of 1-330, as an index of the degree to which D has ceased to function as a human being. Bogdanov's novel suffers from the didact’s need to show the de­ tails of the future society with its technological wonders. Its rambling discussions of philosophical ideas are unrelated to Leonid's mission to Mars or to his personal crisis. The episodes are therefore only casually related, arranged in interchangeable order. Zamyatin, on the other hand, incorporates all his borrowings successfully in the play of themes arranged as polar opposites (fertility-sterility, poly-monotonality, sickness-health, passion-rationality, eccentricity-regularity). The result is that the main themes of We and the central plot situation are all tightly interwoven and characterize the main protagonists consistently. But what kind of “hero" did Zamyatin intend in D-503? We suggest that Zamyatin set himself the task of satirizing proletarian verse whose revolutionary lyricism lent itself to parody through its extremism, and the lyrical proletarian “I’s" who strive to deprive themselves poetically of their individuality. He mocked the former with some bad doggerel (Record 12, 63), and the latter by concocting the persona of a futuristic “proletarian” scientist and writer. Tonally, D-503 is as much an expo­ nent of the United State as the lyrical “we” is of the proletarian poems of 1917-20. As Frank has convincingly shown, this device was practised earlier by Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, where the Underground Man is the satirical representation of the "men of the

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sixties.”46 Dostoevsky’s satire is doubly devastating because the Underground Man is personally such a sick human being that his claim­ ing that he shared the advanced views of the younger generation had to be insufferably insulting to the nihilists. Zamyatin has done the same thing in We. He has taken the ideas of the proletarians, including Bogdanov’s, to their extreme, in order to dramatize their implications of dehumanization. Zoshchenko’s parody of the persona of a proletarian writer might well have applied to D-503: “I am parodying in my works that imaginary, but genuine proletarian writer... I am only parodying. I am temporarily substituting for the proletarian writer.”47 Zamyatin’s satire is made particularly salient by the choice of Bogdanov's own hero Leonid as D-503’s prototype. Zamyatin created D-503 out of the language, themes, and ideology made familiar by the proletarian poets and Bogdanov in the first years of the Soviet period. It seems that Zamyatin’s particular targets in this work are Gastev and Bogdanov. Some readings of We tend to dwell exclusively on its bleak, anti-utopian vision of the future. But, although there is no doubt of the philosophical gravity of the work, this essay has tried to show the valid­ ity of another, generally neglected reading. We is a topical novel which grew consistently and naturally out of the literary models and practices predominating in the immediate post-Revolutionary period.

Notes

1. Some of the best and most extensive discussions of these issues are the following: on imagery: Carl Proffer, "Notes on the Imagery in Zamiatin's We,” Slavic and East European Journal, VII, No. 3 (1963), 269-73; on Dostoevsky’s influence: Robert L. Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague, 1958), 150-57; Richard A. Gregg, "Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible and We,” Slavid Review, XXIV, No. 4 (1965), 680-87; on Biblical themes: Gregg's article just noted, and James Billington's brief discussion in The Icon and the Axe (New York, 1966), 509-11; as political statement: D. Richards, "Four Utopias,” Slavonic and East European Review, XL (1961), 220-28. 2. E.J. Brown mentions Tsiolkovskii's and Wells' popularity in Russia at this time in Russian Literature Since the Revolution (New York, 1963), 74, and Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor treats the matter of Jerome K. Jerome in “A Neglected Source of Zamiatin's Novel We,” The Russian Review, 32, No. 2 (April, 1973), 187-89. 3. M. Gorkii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXX (M. 1955), 156: "And Zamyatin is too intelligent for an artist and should not allow his reason to direct his talent to satire. We is hopelessly bad, a complete sterile thing.” A. Voronskii, Na styke (M-P/Ann Arbor, 1923/1968): "But (We) is not a utopia; it is an artistic pamphlet in the present, and at the same time an attempt at a prognosis of the future ... To write an artistic parody and

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depict communism as some kind of super-barracks under a glass cover is nothing new” (70-71). M. Kuznetsov, "Socialist Realism and Modernism," (“Sotsialisticheskii realizm i modernizm"), Novyi mir, (Aug., 1963), 230-33. 4. Quotations from Zamyatin's critical articles are taken from Mirra Ginsburg's translation, A Soviet Heretic (Chicago, 1970). References hereafter are abbreviated SH with page number added. English quotations form the novel are taken from the Zilboorg translation and are denoted by "We,” followed by Record number and page number. Minor changes have been made in the Zilboorg translation when it was felt that a more literal translation was necessary. Quotations from the Russian text are based on the Inter-Language Literary Associates edition (New York, 1967), denoted as "My," followed by pagination. 5. Proletarskie poety pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi, ed. Z.S. Papernyi, (L. 1959), 21. This is a basic anthology for the poems of this period. Subsequent citations are given by PP and page numbers. 6. Sovetskii teatr, dokumenty i materialy: Russkii sovetskii teatr, 1917-21, ed. A.Z. lufit (L. 1968), 336-38. 7. Brown, op. cit., pp. 75, 77. Brown makes the same point in his "Zamjatin and English Literature,” American Contributions to the Fifth Congress ofSIavists (The Hague, 1963), 35. 8. Other such poems to be found in Papernyi’s anthology are: B.D. Aleksandrovskii’s "My" (1921); "My umeem vse perenosit’ ..." (1921); M.P. Gerasimov’s “My vse voz'mem, my vse poznaem ...” (1917); A.P. Kraiski's “My-odno" (1918; I.S. Loginov's “My—pervye raskaty groma ..." (1919); F.S. Shkulev’s "My, Proletarskie poety" (1922). Many additional examples may be found in the proletarian journals Kuznitsa and Gorn. 9. This was Bogdanov's formal resolution “Proletariat i iskusstvo," passed on September 20, 1918 at the First All-Russian Conference of Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations. See Uteraturnye manifesty, Vol. I, ed. N.L. Brodskii (M./München, 1929/1969), 130. 10. Mikhail Zoshchenko, “O sebe, o kritikakh i o svoei rabote," in Mastera sovremennoi literatury; Mikhail Zoshchenko, Stat’i i materialy (L. 1928), 12. 11. Kirillov, "Pervomaiskii gimn" PP, 232; Kniazev, “Pesnia o ledokhode" PP, 266; Bednyi, "Revolutsionnyi gudok," Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 18. 12. This is a common theme in the early period of the regime. Camilla Gray's The Great Experiment (New York, 1962) shows a photograph of an Agit-lnstructional train on which can be read: "Da zdravstvuet edinaia mirovaia trudovaia sem'ia" (p. 160). 13. V. L'vov-Rogachevskii, Ocherki proletarskoi literatury (M. 1926), 168. The second quote is PP, 6. 14. Gray, 217. 15. A.A. Bogdanov, in Uteraturnye manifesty: “Proletariat i iskusstvo," 130, and "Puti proletarskogo tvorchestva," 139—40. 16. Leon Trotsky, Uterature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1968), 202. 17. A.V. Lunacharskii, “Ocherki russkoi literatury revoliutsionnogo vremeni," from R. Shcherbina, ed., “A.V. Lunacharskii: Neizdannye materialy," Uteratumoe nasledstvo, Vol. 82 (M. 1970), 235. For Pletnev, see Gorn, No. 4 (1919), 30. 18. L’vov-Rogachevskii, 128. 19. V. Pertsov, “Sovremenniki," Novyi LEF, SP 91, III, No. 8-9 (1927), 78. 20. Viktor Nekrasov, "V zhizni i pismakh" (M. 1971), 7. 21. A. Gastev, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul'tury,” in Uteraturnye manifesty, 132-33. This article first appeared in Proletarskaia kul'tura, Nos. 9-10. 22. Lunacharskii, Uteratumoe nasledstvo, 235.

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23. Ernst Toller, Quer durch, Chapter 8: “ZIT,” 121-24. 24. Aleksandrovskii, “Vavalivai bol'she na nashi spiny,” (1918), PP, 79; Berdnikov, “Kuznetsy Kuiut" (1918), PP, 142; Gerasimov, "Truba kak posokh ispolina” (1917), PP, 190; N. Degtiarov, “Kuznetsy,” Kuznitsa, No. 1 (1920), 8; Gutsevich, “Shum zavoda,” Gorn, Nos. 2-3 (1919), 7. 25. See PP, 233. The last two phrases are Gastev's "Bashnia” (1913-17), PP, 152, and "Rel'sy" (1913), PP, 154. 26. See the parody in Alexander Kaun, Soviet Poets and Poetry (Berkeley, 1943), 137, "Zhelezo, zhelezo, zhelezo,” Russian version in L’vov-Rogachevskii, p. 132. 27. For Sadov'ev, see Kaun, p. 140; for Gastev, see PP, 154. 28. Gastev, "Ekspress” (1913-17), PP, 161-72; Gastev, “Oratoru” (1917-19), PP, 176; Gastev, "My vmeste” (1913-17), PP, 160; Obradovich, "Iz okna vagona,” Gorn, No. 4 (1919), 12; Nepaev, “Rassvet," Kuznitsa, No. 2 (1920), 7. 29. Quoted in lurii Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech, Vol. I (New York, 1966), 258. 30. V. Kirillov, 'la podslushal eti pesni blizkikh radostnykh vekov,” (1917), PP, 227. 31. PP, 149. 32. PP, 179. 33. Gastev, "Kran" (1913-17), PP, 157; Aleksandrovskii, “Vavalivai bol'she na nashi spiny” (1918), PP, 80. 34. Gastev, “Bashnia" (1913-17), PP, 152; "My vmeste" (1913-17), PP, 160. Aleksandrovskii, "V zakate," Gorn, Nos. 2-3 (1919), 11; Gastev, “Nash prazdnik" (1913-17), PP, 175. It is startling to run across the Musical Tower in actuality, or nearly so. In an article entitled “Gudki," headed by Gastev's poem, Gorn, No. 9 (1923), Avraamov tells of actual whistles symphonies and gives directions for constructing a steam whistle which will perform the Internationale. Whether or not Zamyatin knew of similar activities, it seems possible that Gastev provided the impetus for both the steam whistle and the Musical Factory in We. In fact, Avraamov suggests that if the apparatus is still in good condition after the concert, it can be used very often, even for daily whistles to and from work. He also tells of a vast “symphony” involving steamships, engines, artillery and cannon, which was carried out on May Day in Baku in 1922, and of earlier attempts in the same vein. The Day of Unanimity in We with its patriotic pageantry may be a satire of these grandiose May 1 celebrations. 35. The first three examples are from PP, 155; the fourth, Gerasimov, PP, 197; and the fifth, Semen-Rodov, "Proletarskie poety,” Kuznitsa, No. 1 (1920), 5. 36. Trotsky, 210. 37. Gastev, “My vmeste," PP, 160. 38. Gastev, “Bashnia," 151, "Kran," 156, and “Ekspress,” 162. In My the “chudovishche" appears in Record 15, 73 and Record 31, 155. 39. PP, 148. 40. A. Gutsevich, "Shum zavoda," Gorn, No. 2-3 (1919), 7; and Kasin, “Da zdravstvuet V.l. Lenin,” Kuznitsa, No. 1 (1920), 4. 41. Christopher Collins, Evgenij Zamjatin, (The Hague-Paris, 1973), 45. 42. Zamiatin, SH, 290. 43. The texts used are A. Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, Izd. Petrogradskogo Soveta Rabochikh i Krasnoarmeiskikh Deputatov, (1918) and Inzhener Menni, Knigoizdatel'stvo Moskovskii rabochii (1922), 5th ed. Page numbers are given in parentheses after the quotations. The translations are my own (H.W.). 44. See the Gregg article referred to in footnote 1. 45. Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), 161.

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46. Joseph Frank, “Nihilism and Notes from the Underground, Sewanee Review, LXIX (1961), 4, 12. 47. Zoshchenko, 12.

BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1984, AND WE: AN ESSAY ON ANTI-UTOPIA E.J. Brown

1. Introduction The researcher approaches the work of Zamyatin with some misgiving. It is not easy to treat as an object of literary investigation a figure so deeply identified with a certain political (or apolitical) position. A Russian writer the roots of whose literary art are basically Russian, drawing their original sustenance from Gogol, Leskov and Remizov, and whose influence has been felt in other literatures perhaps more than that of any other Soviet writer, Zamyatin has still not attracted the attention he deserves from Russian scholars. This was perhaps understandable, since his name very early came to stand, in a ritual idiom which was perhaps more common in the twenties than it is today, as a representative of the “inner emigration.” Articles about him appeared during the twenties, and some of these are important and valuable. But many, perhaps the majority, do not criticize but vituperate, and some of them come under the general heading of what has recently been called “simulated scholarship.” In the West, to which Zamyatin emigrated in 1931, he has fared no better. Though his novel We (My) appeared first in an English translation as early as 1924, there was until 1968 no major study of his work by any Western Slavic scholar. Nor is this surprising. The Western view of Zamyatin tends also to be cramped by cliché. He is known even to scholars, for the most part, only as the author of the novel We, and of the short tales concerned with revolution­ ary Petersburg, such as “The Dragon” (“Drakon”), "Mamai,” and “The Cave” (“Peshchera”). These are understood—mistakenly according to the present writer—as a literary polemic with the revolutionary regime. The real nature of a stimulating and original literary figure has been obscured by generalizations having very little to do with him as a writer, some of which are patently absurd. The present study will attempt to deal with Zamyatin and his work as an important part of contemporary literary history, to indicate the nature of his thematic interest and stylis­ tic behavior, and to trace certain key themes through his own work and

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that of the English writers who have an affinity with him. The rela­ tionship of his own work with that of H.G. Wells, a topic of considerable interest in itself, will then be briefly indicated. In order to establish the scope and nature of his work it will be necessary to state briefly what he wrote and when. The brief descriptive survey which follows deals only with belles lettres and aims to mention everything important.1

2. Zamyatin’s Literary Production His first story appeared in November, 1908, in the magazine Education (Obrazovanie), whose literary editor at the time was Artsybashev. On this story Zamyatin offers only the modest comment: “When I now meet people who've read that story I feel just as uncom­ fortable as I do when I meet an aunt of mine whose dress I wetted when I was a two-year-old"—a remark which is not only a good comment on the story but reveals Zamyatin’s freedom from the normal puritanism of the printed page. He entered Russian literature with the story “Provincials" (“Uezdnoe”), published in Legacy (Zavety, V, 1913), a novella with its setting in the far provinces and featuring characters who live on the bare subsistence level of culture and morality. This work drew to the author the attention of Remizov and Prishvin, and when it came out in a separate edition (Petrograd, 1915) it was widely noticed and reviewed. His next important appearance was with the story “Three Days” (“Tri dnia,” 1914), a subjective, fragmented, and impressionistic account of the Potemkin mutiny in Odessa, which he had witnessed. The events and characters of the mutiny are simply material for artistic treatment, rather than for social or political generalization. A scandal arose over his next work, “In the Backwoods” (“Na kulichkakh"), which also appeared in Legacy (III, 1914), and caused confiscation by the censorship of the number that carried it. Its theme is the idiocy not so much of rural as of military life; and its inferno of debased human types offended the censor as a comment on Russian military prowess in the Far East, where the action of the story was located. The story “The Womb” (“Chrevo”) appeared in Russian Notes (Russkie zapiski, IV, 1915) and “Alatyr" in Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl', IX, 1915). The latter story, along with “Provincials” and “In the Backwoods” deter­ mined the nature of Zamyatin's pre-revolutionary reputation with the Russian reading pubiic. The central characters are again rural grotes­ ques from the world of minor officials, described in the “skaz” manner of Leskov. The stories “The Elder” (“Starshina”) and “April” (“Aprel”’) also appeared in 1915, the first in Monthly Journal (Ezhemesiatsnyi

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zhurnal, I), and the second in The Contemporary (Sovremennik, IV). Zamyatin’s fairy tales, later published under the collective title Tales for Grownup Children (Bol’shim detiam skazki, Petrograd-Berlin, Grzebin, 1922), were almost all written and published between 1916 and 1918. Some of these were published in Gorky's Chronicle (Letopis’, IV, 1916). "Dormidon,” a delightful and devastating satire on the enforcers of salvation, was published in New Life (Novaia zhizn’, 1918), also edited by Gorky. The "tales" are brief, pointed fables featuring human, divine, and animal characters. Some of them are pessimistic philo­ sophic fragments, others tolerant comments on human foibles; and still others, the "Tales of Fita” ("Skazki pro Fitu”), for instance, are bitter Swiftian satires on pompous official fools. There also appeared in 1916 the stories "In Writing" ("Pis’menno") and "The Diehards” ("Kriazhi”), as well as "Afrika,” which treats with gentle irony the human search for promised lands, a not infrequent theme in his work. We now come to Zamyatin’s work published at the time of or after the revolution. Islanders (Ostrovitiane), a short novel written in part during his stay in England during the First World War, and published in Petrograd in the Scythian Almanac (Almanakh Skify, II, 1918), is an amusing impressionistic satire on the patterned rigidity of bourgeois standards of respectability. The novella is a kind of preliminary sketch for We, written in 1920 and first published in an English translation in 1924.2 The literary method and the basic thematic content of Islanders is developed further in We, where the rigid patterns of London life have become the utopian laws of a state of the twenty-ninth century. Fisher of Men (Lovets chelovekov), published in House of Arts (Dorn iskusstv, II, 1922), is also concerned with London and the English character. Its principal personage is an outwardly respectable gentleman who is en­ gaged in blackmailing young couples in love. "The Sign" ("Znamenie”), which also appeared in 1918, moves from the asphalt certitudes of London back to Zamyatin’s preferred habitat, the cultural wilderness. An amazingly potent and original verbal artifact whose theme is the creation of a saintly legend, it lends to primitive and uncivilized religious emotion an exotic appeal. A brief piece called "Real Truth” ("Pravda istinnaia”), published in New Life (1917) is a letter from a servant girl in town to her mother in the country in which, in her naive and provincial idiom, she expresses her grief at having to live in the city. The stories "Mamai” and "The Cave” (1921-1922), published, respectively, in House of Arts and Notes of a Dreamer (Zapiski mechtatelei), are both laid in Petrograd during the winter of revolution and civil war, but in those stories the city has shed its rational integument of streets and squares and has become—in

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“The Cave," for instance—a prehistoric area where human beings in­ habit the cold caves of their apartments. The brief sketch “The Dragon," published in 1918 is, like “Mamai" and "The Cave," a subjec­ tive apprehension of the winter of revolution, when life assumed forms that were strange and terrible. It is hardly defensible to interpret these stories as political commentary on the revolution, as is sometimes done. “The North" (“Sever," 1922), one of Zamyatin’s most powerful works, contains in a small compass many of the themes that most intrigued him, and is almost a textbook model of his “skaz" technique. The play The Fires of St. Dominic (Ogni sviatogo Dominika, 1922), laid in Spain at the time of the Inquisition, presents in dramatic form the sympathy for heretics and rebels that he expressed in essays and articles written in the same period. The story “How the Monk Erasmus was Cured" (“O tom kak istselen byl inok Erazm," 1922) is in the form of a monastic chronicle reminiscent of church literature. It tells how a wise elder cures a novice, who happens to be an artist, of his power to infect others. It was published with drawings by B. Kustodiev. Efforts to read a topical message into this story produced some of the more amusing kur’ezy of the twenties. Rus', 1923, is a kind of narrative meditation on the native Russian character types represented in a set of drawings by Kustodiev, presented as a text to accompany the drawings. “A Story about the Most Important Thing" (“Rasskaz o samom glavnom,” 1924), is, as we shall see, the most philosophical of Zamyatin's stories, and expresses the relativity of all values. “How Ivan Built the Church of God” (“Kak Ivan postroil tserkov’ Bozhiiu,” 1924) is a parable on the barrenness of good intentions which use evil means. The story “Iks” (1926) is a narrative tour de force couched in a provin­ cial idiom and relating in mock-heroic manner serious and even tragic events, which become ridiculous in the telling. "Comrade Churygin Has the Floor” (“Slovo predostavliaetsia tovarishchu Churyginu,” 1927) is a stylistic experiment in the form of a public speech, setting forth the reminiscences of a comrade for whom the use of formal Russian gram­ mar and syntax is a new and not fully mastered skill and who preten­ tiously distorts forms and misunderstands meanings. The method is basically “Leskovian” in that it involves the distortion of “foreign” or “learned” language by an ignorant native speaker, but in Zamyatin’s work much more than the language is distorted: a whole complex of philosophical concepts and moral values is ruined by way of translation into Churygin’s idiom. “The Flood” (“Navodnenie," 1929), regarded by many as one of Zamyatin’s best tales, deals with the themes of death and life and the dialectical connection of the two, and in its complex

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structure of human relationships seems to be offering a serious though somewhat obscure philosophic statement. Zamyatin wrote, in addition to The Fires of St. Dominic, three other plays. The Flea (Blokha), based on the folk-tale about the smiths of Tula and on Leskov’s Lefty (Levsha), was presented by MKhAT in 1925 and was still running successfully in 1929, when it was removed from the repertory. Society of Honored Bell-ringers (Obshchestvo pochetnykh zvonarei), a dramatization of Islanders, was presented in Lenin­ grad in 1925. Attilla, completed in 1928, was never presented or pub­ lished in Russia.3 A novel, The Scourge of God, (Bich Bozhii), based on the theme of that play was published posthumously in Paris in incomplete form. In both the play and the novel Zamyatin attempted to present a broad philosophy of history, showing that the days of Attila were much like our own times, “a period of great world wars, and of the collision of the already dying culture of the west with a wave of fresh barbarian peoples.” In spite of the great difference in subject matter there is, as we shall see, a striking similarity in basic philosophy be­ tween The Scourge of God and We. Zamyatin’s writing after he left Russia in 1931 is rather sparse and much less important than his earliest work or than his stories of the twenties. He wrote a number of short stories, some of which were translated into French. They are for the most part brief satiric anecdotes whose humor and linguistic power are relatively mild. He wrote articles for the French press, but these are beyond the scope of the present study.

3. Zamyatin’s Chief Theme While Zamyatin’s range of thematic interest seems at first sight very wide, reaching from a military outpost in the Far East to a study of social organization in a state of the distant future, a closer inspection reveals his organic attachment to one particular theme. Zamyatin might be characterized as a writer who persistently negates "the city" and who finds his own most congenial matter for esthetic formulation among the precivilized and the primitive. Not only does he describe people like Baryba in “Provincials,” who has hardly a trace of civilized moral sense, who steals from his benefactors and bears false witness against his friends, or a Potifona in “Alatyr,” or Captain Arancheev in "In the Backwoods,” that fantasy of lust and gluttony; but he takes literary interest also in naive and charming primitives, the fisherman Fedor Volkov in "Afrika” where “Elephants? But why not: you just sit on him

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and he takes you wherever you want to go. He'll be running along, then he plays on a silver trumpet and the way he plays you just can’t hear enough of it, and he carries you off to undiscovered lands," and of course the wonderfully appealing Marei in “The North" with his animal-like mate Pelka. In the story “Rus’" the characters and scenes upon which Zamyatin's imagination lingers are “No prospects mea­ sured off by Peter’s ruler—no: that's Petersburg, 'Rossiia.' Here you have the real Russia (Rus’), narrow little streets that go up and down so the noisy kids will have a place to slide in winter—alleys, streets that lead nowhere, gardens, and fences, lots of fences." And Zamyatin's enthusiastic appreciation of Jack London, published as a preface to the Universal Literature (Vsemirnaia literatura) edition of London’s works, reveals the characteristic preoccupation of Zamyatin himself: Our city life is already obsolete. Cities, like old men, bundle up against the bad weather in asphalt and iron. Cities, like old men, fear excessive movement and substitute machines and push-buttons for all healthful muscular work ... But if a man still has his young blood burning in him and if the hard iron power of his muscles is looking for a way out, for struggle, then that man runs away from the decrepit cities .. . runs wherever his eyes lead him, anywhere: to the field, or the forest or the sea, to the north or to the south.4

It should surprise no one that those lines came from the pen of the man who wrote Islanders and We. The “city” when it does occur in Zamyatin’s writings is a monster of mechanical efficiency, London in Islanders or the “city-state" in We, or else it is the fog-bound snow-covered haunt of mammoths, dragons, and cave-dwellers. The possibility of a normal “realistic” city is never admitted in the art of Zamyatin. And always, in those impossible, dream-like cities, there are characters who rebel against them and try to find their way to the free air “outside the wall.” There is in his work a long series of escapes or attempted escapes from one level of organized life to a lower, less organized and supposedly more free level. This notion of escape is a constantly recurring theme and is deeply characteristic. O’Kelley and Didi, the bohemian individualists in Islanders, resist the pressures of the bourgeois world and remain outside its pale of respectability in a kind of half-world of their own.^ln We, I-330 and her lover D-503 similar­ ly attempt to escape the conventions of their time by finding their way outside the glass wall to the hairy creatures who still live among the “debris” of nature. On a much lower level the primitive fisherman Marei attempts an escape with his mate from the world of the merchant Kortoma, who, in burlesque form, embodies “Piter” and rational organization: “Kortoma's accounts are in strict order—not just any old

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way, but by a system of triple bookkeeping. ‘It’s time we lived in accord­ ance with the West European nations,' such was Kortoma’s favorite saying.” Similar to these escapes is that of Fedor Volkov, for whom “Afrika” is Canaan and Goshen. Dashutka’s letter home describing the cultural wonders of city life is full of simple yearning for the country: “How I would like to go out now barefoot into the garden, and have the dusty ground under my feet.” These words might have served as a motto for the revolutionaries in We. Though Zamyatin described himself as a "neo-realist” it will be obvious that his characteristic thematic interest might rather be labelled “romantic.”

4. Zamyatin’s Philosophy Zamyatin’s work before the revolution offers no evidence of a con­ sistent philosophical position, other than a vaguely Rousseauistic urge toward the unspoiled primitive. And Zamyatin’s Rousseauism is much more esthetic than it is philosophical. He is drawn to the primitive and the prerational because the life he finds—or, better, imagines—outside the “wall" offers both piquancy of dialect and novelty of character. In Zamyatin's subjective apprehension, with which he completely infects the reader, Marei and Pelka are more interesting than Kortoma, O’Kelley and the music-hall girl Didi than Vicar Dooley; and D-503’s atavistic hair lends to him a possibility of irrational adventure that should not exist for the good citizen of a well-ordered state. The manner in which Zamyatin utilized fugitive subjective impress­ ions of reality in creating both character and situation he revealed him­ self in the essay “Backstage” (“Za kulisy”)5: “I woke up at some little station near Moscow and raised the shade. Right in front of my window, just as though in a frame, the physiognomy of the station policeman floated past me: a low overhanging forehead, little bear-like eyes, jaw­ bones frightfully square. I managed to read the name of the station: Barybino. Right there the novella “Provincials” and its hero Anfim Bary­ ba took form.” In view of this frank statement it is unsound to assume that Baryba in Zamyatin's story has anything in common with that actual police official whom the author chanced to glimpse, or even that his story tells us anything useful about provincial police officials as a class, and it is risky to interpret the work of such a writer in tendentious or topical terms. And when Mr. Richards in his excellent book on Zamyatin offers the opinion that “the final picture of the drunken Baryba, rejected by the

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father and mocked by the onlookers as he blunders along, heavy, grunting, and helpless, symbolizes the state, not only of provincial life but of old Russia itself," one should, it would seem, view such an interesting idea with great reserve. As a leading member of the Serapion Brothers in the early twenties Zamyatin insisted that literature be free of social or political tendency, and while it has been suggested that this apolitical position was a mask for political hostility, it seems not unlikely that Zamyatin, in spite of his early membership in the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, was genuinely indifferent to actual political events and the philosophies that motivated them. He wrote two stories dealing with the events of 1905, but one could not assume from a mere reading of the stories that the author of them was involved in politics. He wrote two novellas, the setting of which was England during the First World War, but there is no allusion whatever to the war in Islanders, and the Zeppelin raid in Fisher of Men is a noisy and colorful interlude in the story whose function in the plot is to break down Mrs. Lory’s cool reserve and make her accessible to her lover. The First World War as an event of some historical importance was simply not part of Zamyatin’s artistic con­ sciousness at the time he wrote those stories. And in the stories he wrote about Petrograd at the time of the revolution and the civil war his attention is directed to the poignant but petty tragedies of individual human beings rather than to the tremendous historical event, whether viewed as triumph or as tragedy. Contemporary history provided him with material for artistic treatment, but as an honest artist he refrains from direct political or philosophical commentary. Yet Zamyatin’s work of the twenties has given rise to the idea that he is an important philosophical writer. The literary works that contain his thought are We (1920), The Fires of St. Dominic (1922), “A Story about the Most Important Thing” (1924), Attila (1928), and the post­ humously published unfinished novel The Scourge of God (1939). Let us consider them briefly as philosophical statements. We, as we have seen, is closely related to Islanders, and its basic theme is rebellion against a rigid and universally enforced code of correct behavior. In both novels this rebellion is given philosophic motivation as an effort to free human emotions from their confinement in a rigidly rational social structure. The London Vicar Dooley’s plan for “universal salvation" is mathematically perfect, involving the rational organization of every hu­ man activity. The electric iron which the character Campbell would buy Didi for their establishment is a symbol of conventional propriety, as well as of a life neatly pressed and patterned. The Sunday gentlemen strolling properly in a proper British uniformity are an early sketch for

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the citizens of We marching in ranks on their daily walk. The intellectual preoccupations of Zamyatin are essentially the same in Islanders as in We, where one of the gods of rationalism is the American industrial efficiency expert F.H. Taylor.6 But there is an important difference between Islanders and We. For the latter work Zamyatin, perhaps influenced by the polemical ambi­ ence of the period, has devised an explicit philosophical statement, which is expressed in the impassioned speeches of the revolutionary young woman I-330. Statements very much like hers appear in the article “Tomorrow” (“Zavtra”), written at approximately the same time, and in the article entitled “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy” (“O literature, revoliutsii, i entropii”), published in 1924 as part of the collec­ tion Writers About Literature and About Themselves (Pisateli o litera­ ture i o sebe).7 To summarize in a rational system the points made in that essay would do violence to the spirit of the work. It is a series of subjective aperçus, each one a fragment of thought, the whole bound together by a central subjective intuition expressed in the terminology of the science ("Nova,” entropy, relativity) and the philosophy (Hegelian dialectics) contemporary to Zamyatin. It is highly personal and poetic—is, as a matter of fact, a literary production, and is directed in the main against the dogmatic rationalism which Zamyatin felt was developing in the Russia of his day. Against the ruthlessly mechanical rationalism of the dogmatists Zamyatin urges the view, neither original nor unfamiliar, that the life process proceeds by way of dialectical movement, that all "established” values are relative, and that in human societies heretics are the necessary agents of change. Fiery, crimson, and deathdealing is the law of revolution; but the death it brings is the embryo of new life, of a new star. Cold and blue as ice, blue as the icy interplanetary infinities is the law of entropy. The flame that was crimson becomes pink and warm—no longer deathdealing but comfortable; the sun ages into a planet suitable for roads, stores, beds, prostitutes and jails: such is the law . . . Let the flame grow cold tomorrow or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days equal years, centuries). But someone should see today what’s about to happen tomorrow, and speak heretically even today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only medicine (a bitter one) against the entropy of human thought . . . All truths are mistaken; the dialectical process means precisely that today’s truths are tomorrow's errors; there is no final number.

The play The Fires of St. Dominic, like the essays mentioned and the two novels, provides a telling commentary on dogmatic authority and in the person of the Spanish Inquisitor shows the extent to which such authority corrupts human beings. Brilliantly and courageously

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Zamyatin dissects the motivations and the mode of operation of a police power responsible only to itself. As we have already seen, the story "A Story about the Main Thing” presents in symbolic form a statement about the relativity of all values. In the play Attila and in the novel The Scourge of God Zamyatin has transferred to an actual historical setting his single, idiosyncratic literary theme, and given it a philosophic motivation. Attila and his Huns, a new and fresh force from the outer limits of the civilized world, are contrasted with the effete and enervated Romans of the “City,” whose minds and bodies have grown soft with decay/As in the novel We, Zamyatin has here contrived a situation in which vital and primitive beings violently disturb the entropie calm of the arch-City itself. J To summarize, Zamyatin’s philosophy, a mixture of his basic romanticism with modern scientific vocabulary and Hegelian dialectics, does not appear in his work until the twenties. The earliest attempt to formulate that philosophy is the novel We, and perhaps its clearest literary formulation is the novel The Scourge of God. That philosophy seems to the present writer to have been an artificial intellectual super­ structure developed in answer to the insistent demand upon writers—even by the most liberal of critics—that they take a definite ideological position. It is not a connected or coherent system but a series of brilliant poetic insights. Stated in the simplest terms, it was a philosophy designed to uphold the independence and integrity of the artist by insisting on his right to be a heretic.

5. Zamyatin’s Art

Zamyatin on at least two occasions attempted to analyze and ex­ plain his own creative processes. The lectures he delivered in the House of Arts in 1920, two of which have been published,8 and an article appearing in the collection How We Write (Kak my pishem) reveal with unusual clarity and originality not only his own approach to the craft of writing, but the philosophical assumptions and esthetic theories of the group with whom he identified himself: the “neorealists.” Students of Soviet literature have pointed out that Zamyatin’s lectures in Petrograd on the art of writing were an important seminal event in the history of Soviet prose of the twenties. It should be emphasized that the “craft” he taught was not that of the realistic writers nor of the symbol­ ists or futurists, but almost exclusively of the “neorealists.” The exam­ ples of literary language and device which he uses come from a rather narrow range of Russian authors, and the names which occur most

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frequently are those of Bely, Remizov, and Zamyatin himself. Zamyatin uses their works as textbooks of modern literary form, just as he would have taught modern physics from the works of Einstein. In the lecture entitled “Contemporary Russian Literature” (“Sovremennaia russkaia literatura”) Zamyatin traces a dialectical de­ velopment from the realists, whose attention was focused on men as particular earth-bound facts, through the symbolists, who saw “man in general” as part of some higher reality, and at last to the “neorealists,” who represent a kind of unity of opposites in that they attempt gener­ alization while still dealing with concrete human reality (byt). The scheme he sets up is both interesting and suggestive and is character­ istic of the Hegelian forms in which his mind operated. Those he lists as neorealists in some, at least, of their works are—in addition to Bely and Remizov—Sologub, Sergeev-Tsensky, Prishvin, Alexei Tolstoi, and Zamyatin himself. He observes that the attraction to provincial life and language, his own principal theme, is characteristic to some extent of all the neoreal­ ists and Zamyatin explains this interest of theirs in terms which apply equally to himself: Life in big cities is like that in factories: it de-individualizes, makes people somehow all the same, machine-like. And so it happened that many of the neo-realists, in their urge to create the most striking images, turned their faces away from the great city and looked to the provinces and backways.

Other characteristics of the neorealists are their search for a more “real” reality through fantasy and distortion, their tendency to an im­ pressionistic style, and their use of popular dialectic material. And in their technique there is a kind of co-operative effort on the part of writer and reader, the former furnishing fragmented thoughts and impressions which the latter actively “creates.” Zamyatin’s remarks on the psychology of creativity reveal his con­ viction that the rational part of man plays only a secondary role in artistic creation, which, he maintains, takes place in the sphere of the subconscious. In his essay "Backstage” Zamyatin compares the condi­ tion of a mind disposed to creative activity with a railway sleepingcompartment lighted only by the blue night lamp, when objects are visible but not in their normal daylight shapes and colors. In such a state the “fantasy” creates dreamlike images that have at the same time a quality of vividness denied to objects seen in rational daylight. In the materials that we have Zamyatin did not attempt a detailed analysis of the psychological factors operating in literary creation, but

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from the examples he gives of his own experience the literary images he characteristically created were the result, not of any conscious cere­ bral purpose, but of a complex interaction of memory and association with passing impression and subjective feeling. A conscious philo­ sophic and perhaps polemic purpose entered, as we have seen, into the creation of certain important works of the twenties, and the psycho­ logical factors at work in them might be the subject of analysis. Zamyatin’s stylized language is his own most original esthetic resource. His stories of the provinces probably do not provide an accu­ rate account of provincial speech, and on his own admission he knew nothing of the actual locale and personnel portrayed in the story “In the Backwoods." But in their selection of occasional local words (or even words strange to the literary ear), by the generous employment of forms, diminutives for instance, which are felt as non-literary, and by simplicity and colloquial casualness of syntax, those stories do artfully contrive to produce in the sophisticated reader an illusion of immediate contact with the deeply primitive. Similarly, the stories “The Sign” and “The Monk Erasmus” suggest that language of church chronicles, the former in an extremely primitive form. The stories “Afrika” and "Ela” contrive an impression of the dialect spoken in the fishing villages of the far north; and in the story Islanders, as Zamyatin has said, the language is deliberately stylized so as to suggest a translation from English. And in the novel We with its clipped telegraphic manner and swift ellipses he attempts to suggest the rationalized thought and simplified language of the twenty-ninth century, disturbed, it's true, by constant interference. The delight experienced by readers of Zamyatin is to a large extent bound up with the consciousness he conveys of linguistic vigor, variety, and possibility. The style he cultivated is, of course, skaz, and his closest contemporary Russian relatives were Remizov and Bely. We have seen the attraction of Zamyatin to the primitive and prerational in the matter of his stories; it is now clear that a similar preoc­ cupation governed his manner. He avoids in them the organized method of rational statement in favor of impression, suggestion, and image, conveyed in a language as free as possible of syntactic complexity.

6. Zamyatin's English Relatives Zamyatin’s first image of a modern society organized along effi­ cient rational lines was London; and it is not surprising, therefore, that a similarity should be observed in two English writers who followed him

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and whose novels develop in new forms the themes of Islanders and We, though only the latter work could have been known to them. Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 share certain basic assumptions with We, but differ from that book in important ways. Let us look first at the similarities. Some of these are surface and obvious; for instance, Zamyatin’s benevolent dictator appears in Huxley’s work as the World Controller and in Orwell’s as Big Brother; the “mephi” outside the wall in We have their counterpart in Huxley’s “savage reservation" and in Orwell’s “proles.” What is more important and perhaps not so obvious is that all three books share an implicit assumption: that the more complex and highly organized a society becomes, the less free are its individual members. All three works assume the direction of modern European society is toward larger and more complex organization, and that the regimented world of Ford, Taylor, or the proletarian extremists will result at last in the disappearance of the individual human being in favor of the mass. The assumption is never explicitly stated, and of course never criticized; yet it will hardly withstand serious examination. Zamyatin’s strictures on England, particularly, are pointless if taken as referring specifically to England, since regard for individual liberty and the indi­ vidual human person is characteristic, not so much of primitive and backward societies, as precisely of those that are technologically and culturally more advanced—England, for instance. A society that, like Zamyatin’s city-state in We, had attained complete control of the en­ vironment would surely have reached such a level of education that the primitive regimentation he imagines would seem to be an anachronism. And Huxley’s world organization can hardly be imagined if the mass of human beings are to remain on the level of vulgar prejudice and vulgar uniformity he foresees. The high level of co-operation and technological knowledge in all these states presupposes a sophisticated if not highly moral human community. That such societies should hold the individual human being as of no importance is not beyond the bounds of possibility, but it cannot be accepted as the premise of the argument, and is not borne out by the history of human societies as we know it. All three works assume that certain indispensable human values—respect for the individual person, love, honor, and even poetry—are “somehow” (and this somehow conceals another logical trap) preserved on the lower and less well-organized levels of life while they disappear from the higher. “If there is hope for humanity,” says Orwell’s Winston, “it is in the proles,” who have not forgotten how to sing; the hairy creatures "outside the wall” in We must revivify the effete automatons of the City; and in Huxley’s novel the romantic theme of the

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“noble savage” appears in its most naive form: his savage knows the great myths, feels his dignity as a human being, hungers for religion, and even reads Shakespeare (I). There is no adequate attempt in any of these books to examine the concrete social or economic factors that would lead to the debasement of human values: they offer only an abstract argument in favor of the simple and primitive as against the complex and cultivated. Reason is of course uncomfortable with the belated Rousseauism of the three novels; but it was never the intention of the authors that reason be accommodated. The satiric intent of all such novels was neatly expressed by Zamyatin himself in his essay on H.G. Wells.9 Speaking of Wells he says “He makes use of his social fantasies almost exclusively for the purpose of revealing defects in the existing social order." The same observation might be made of the three novels under discussion, all of which are legitimate heirs of the “anti-utopias” of Wells. All three pre­ sent images of tendencies present in the society of their own day. We draws on the experience of modern Europe with its rationalized produc­ tion and great cities, and on the recent nightmare of war and civil war during which human beings had indeed become “units.” And its satire is directed also at the collectivist mystique present in the Russia of his own day, at the “planetarity" of proletarian poets and the crude philoso­ phy of the “mass” to which Mayakovsky referred in the lines: The Proletcultists never speak of "I” or of the personality. They consider the pronoun "I” a kind of rascality.

But in my opinion if you write petty stuff, you will never crawl out of your lyrical slough even if you substitute We for I.10

Huxley's Brave New World is a bitterly satirical image of the mass culture of his own day, which he sees as vulgarly triumphant in the future. Psychology in his utopia is debased to “emotional engineering,” medicine to painkilling, education to “hypnopaedia,” and the English language has become the vehicle of cheap journalism, propaganda, and advertising jingles. Music is the accompaniment of sexual orgies. The future world he offers to the imagination is one completely con­ quered by the “popular" journalism, literature, and music, and by the

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popular prejudices (including “class” prejudice) of the early twentieth century. Orwell’s work, published in 1948, is much more obviously topical and contemporary than the others. The London of 1984 with its shortages, discomforts, drabness, wartime regimentation and occa­ sional rocket bombs is the London of the 1940s, during and immediate­ ly after the Second World War, with a Stalin-type dictatorship superim­ posed upon it; and in Winston’s furious rebellion against the "state” of the future and that image of Big Brother which suggests both Stalin and Hitler, one can sense Orwell’s own irritation at the conditions of his own life. All three works purport to project into the future in satiric terms the philosophy by which the society of their own day is dominated. In We, reason is the court of highest appeal; and no area of life is left out of the benevolent government’s planned scientific calculus, the purpose of which is to make men happy and secure. The Benefactor expresses this philosophy in terms which are a conscious echo of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, as many students have pointed out. In Huxley’s utopia a kind of utilitarianism seems to be dominant and the World Government, fashioned to produce the greatest happi­ ness for the greatest number of people, has found it necessary to sacrifice to this goal not only freedom, but truth and beauty. Like the Benefactor in We, Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, patiently ex­ plains his philosophy: "Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass pro­ duction demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.” Orwell’s book departs radically from the other two in its notion of the philosophy motivating the rulers of his world. In that world no Grand Inquisitor or Benefactor works and thinks tirelessly for the benefit of mankind. Orwell, who lived through the years of the European dictatorships, presents his Party leaders as men nakedly enamored of political power, who do not justify themselves by claiming that they use that power to advance human welfare. The leaders of 1984 are philo­ sophical descendants, not of the Grand Inquisitor, but rather of Shigalyov and Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. If the three works are compared as literary products it is obvious that We is very different from its descendants not only in structure and style, but particularly in its quality of ironic humor. Huxley’s novel is heavy-handed and obvious by comparison, and Orwell’s pictures of the new world do not amuse us, as Zamyatin’s do for the most part, but rather terrify and warn us. The difference is simply that Orwell was

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afraid of his enemy, exaggerated his power, and tried to communicate to the reader his own apprehension. Zamyatin's mood is one of ironic contempt for collectivists and cosmists. Along with ironic humor, Zamyatin’s book draws upon deep springs of optimism which arise, no doubt, from his basically Hegelian notion of historical processes. His anti-utopia simply does not contain the fright­ ening prophecy regarding the human prospect which has sometimes been ascribed to it. The Benefactor does not really have complete control. There are many revolutionaries; in fact, almost all the charac­ ters we meet are in the movement—and rebellion is still in progress with the issue in doubt as the novel ends. In spite of its flagrant anti-rationalism, We is a truly great book, which will probably outlive its relatives in the genre. It is a confident and triumphant satire of any and all Establishments, religious or social, bourgeois or communist, that seek to enforce their particular and temporary values on all human beings as eternal verities.

7. The Legacy of H. G. Wells That confidence in the human future world which Zamyatin ex­ pressed even in his pictures of a dehumanized society may be partly explained by an intellectual affinity for H.G. Wells, and an early admira­ tion for the work of that English writer. Zamyatin's articles on Wells are subtle and perceptive. He is completely at ease in dealing not only with the whole corpus of Wells’s work, but with the complex topic of science fantasy itself and the relationship of Wells to the writers of utopias and anti-utopias. His own attraction to the genre he calls “social-fantastic" may derive in part from his interest in Wells. As he points out, the novel We has many predecessors and contemporary relatives in the genre of the anti-utopia, among them Jack London’s The Iron Heel; but its most important immediate ancestors were Wells's fantastic novels. In his article on Wells Zamyatin does not allude to an interesting fact in the development of Wells’s outlook on the human future. It can, I believe, be shown that between the writing of The Time Machine (1895) and The World Set Free (1914) Wells’s fantastic novels often express a pessimism that we find also in Huxley and Orwell. A Modern Utopia (1904), The World Set Free and the later Men Like Gods (1923) are evidence of a conscious rejection by Wells of such attitudes, and of an effort to imagine human affairs directed by the human reason rather than drifting at the mercy of retrograde evolution (The Time Machine), or of irrational and insatiable avarice (The Sleeper Awakes). Of The

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Sleeper Awakes Wells said in an introduction prepared for a new edi­ tion in 1921 : Will such a world ever exist? I will confess I doubt it. At the time when I wrote this story I had a considerable belief in its possibility but later on, in Anticipations (1900), I made a very careful analysis of the causes of town aggregation and showed that a period of town dispersal was already beginning. And the thesis of a gradual and systematic en­ slavement of organised labor presupposes an intelligence, a power of combination, and a wickedness in the class of rich financiers and industrial organizers, such as this class certainly does not possess and probably cannot possess ... The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare that was dreamt nearly a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil and suffering may be in store for mankind; but to this immense, grim organization of servitude our race will never come.

The World Set Free and We are strikingly similar in basic theme. In both novels the “evil and suffering” that man may have to face are presented in terms of a world-wide atomic war in the course of which the great centers of civilization are destroyed. Wells, it is true, described the great atomic war itself in what Zamyatin called “Goyaesque” im­ ages of widespread and wanton cruelty, while the war figures only as the prehistory of the city-state in We. In both novels reason then takes control of human affairs to order them for the security and happiness of the survivors. Here the similarity ends. For in Wells’s novel the "little French rationalist” Le Blanc, a warm and positive character, succeeds in drawing together the surviving human brains and talent, now chas­ tened by disaster, to fashion a world governed by justice and reason, with no impairment of essential human freedom. The ending of the novel is a happy and even a triumphant one; and though Wells’s optim­ ism would surely be described as out of date, his argument about the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of such a world still has the ring of plausibility. In We, on the contrary, “the little French rationalist” who conceives and organizes a world government has been transformed into that enormous, metallic, absolute ruler whose minions operate a “Gas Bell” to force confessions and who atomizes dissidents. Though both Wells and Zamyatin imagine a secure and happy world from which the irra­ tional has been eliminated, that world for Zamyatin is an infernal paradise, and he looks for hope to the uncivilized and unorganized creatures who still (“somehow") preserve essential human qualities. Yet, as we have seen, the total effect of the novel is, if you like, "optimistic.” Like the Huns in Roman times, the Mephi are the antith­ esis of the frozen, formal civilization of the One State (Edinoe

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gosudarstvo); and since in history nothing is permanently frozen, one leaves Zamyatin's great novel with the hope of new upheavals, a new synthesis, and a new stage.11

Notes

1. The work of D.J. Richards, Zamjatin (London, Bowes and Bowes, 1962), is an interesting recent contribution. A thorough and objective study of Zamyatin is Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley, 1968). This work contains an extensive and apparently complete bibliography. 2. We, translated by Gregory Zilboorg (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1924). 3. It was published in Novyi zhurnal, No. 24 (1950). 4. Dzhek London, Syn volka i drugie rasskazy. Pod redaktsiei i s vystupleniem Evgeniia Zamiatina (Petrograd, Vsemirnaia Literatura, No. 13). 5. Published in Kak my pishem: sbornik state/ (Leningrad, Izdatel’stvo pisatelei, 1930). 6. Evidence of intense interest in Taylor's system during the time Zamyatin was writing We is provided in an article by N. Krupskaia, "Sistema Teilora i organizatsiia raboty sovetskikh uchrezhdenii," published in Krasnaia nov', No. 1 (June, 1921), pp. 140-146. Krupskaya praises the Taylor system as applied to factory organization in the United States, especially the division of labor and rationalized accounting of time, and urges its application in the Soviet Union. Mathematicians of my acquaintance have ques­ tioned my interpretation of the "Taylor" references in We. To some of them the context suggests that the reference is to Brook Taylor (1685-1731), the English mathematician whose works formed the basis for differential calculus. Zamyatin has given us no help on this. 7. Pisateli o literature i o sebe (Moscow, Krug, 1924). Reprinted in the collection Litsa, pp. 245-257. 8. The lectures entitled "Contemporary Russian Prose" (“Sovremennaia russkaia proza”) and “The Psychology of Creativity" ("Psikhologiia tvorchestva”) were published in Grani, No. 32 (1956). In addition to these items that issue contains the story "The Flood," and two excellent articles on Zamyatin, A. Kashin, "Artist and Man" ("Khudozhnik i chelovek"), and N. Andreiev, "Zamiatin's Heresy" ("Eres' Zamiatina”). 9. Gerbert Uells, Èpokha, 1922. Reprinted in Litsa, pp. 103-147. 10. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, IV (Moscow, 1957), 122. 11. Among the materials published on Zamyatin should be mentioned lurii Annenkov, “Evgenii Zamiatin (Vospominaniia)," Grani, No. 51 (1962), pp. 60-97. The article is of prime importance for Zamyatin's biography. It contains, not only Annenkov's own re­ miniscences of Zamyatin, but documents touching Zamyatin’s relations with both the Tsarist and the Soviet police, material on literary life in the twenties in the Soviet Union, and a number of letters from Zamyatin to Annenkov. Material on Zamyatin appears in Mosty, No. 9 (1962): "Videnie,” and "O moikh zhenakh, o ledokolakh, i o Rossii.” Also of interest is Boris Souvarine, "Le souvenir de Zamiatine,” Preuves, Juin 1962, and Christ­ opher Collins, "Islanders," in Major Soviet Writers; Essays in Criticism, Edward J. Brown, ed., New York, 1973, pp. 209-220. An original and stimulating analysis of We is Richard Gregg, "Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible and We,”

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Slavic Review, December, 1965. Some interesting insights are to be found in Christopher Collins, Evgenij Zamjatin. An Interpretive Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. An earlier version of my essay "Brave New World, 1984, and We" ("Zamjatin and English Literature") appeared in American Contributions to the Fifth International Con­ gress of Slavists, Vol. II, Literary Contributions (The Hague: Mouton, 1963).

MATHEMATICAL IMAGERY IN MUSIL’S YOUNG TÖRLESS AND ZAMYATIN’S WE John J. White

Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (My, 1920), was written in the U.S.S.R. but has never appeared there because of its anti-utopian sentiments. It was first published in an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg.1 With its description of a future world, the work has often been seen as a forerun­ ner of both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and in many ways an influence on them. Orwell was familiar with We and had written a review praising it prior to writing 1984.2 The scene of We is the Single State nine hundred years from now. Life is controlled by the Benefactor, Big Brother’s antecedent, in the interests of rationally governed happiness. It is because Zamyatin’s novel, like those of Huxley and Orwell, so clearly prefigures many of the ills of modern totalitarianism, indeed of life in any twentieth-century society, that criticism of We has mainly been concerned with its place in the history of ideas and has discussed it in the context of utopian, or rather anti-utopian, novels alone. Edward J. Brown’s "Zamyatin and English Literature”3 rightly remarks that "the novel My has many prede­ cessors and contemporary relatives in the genre of anti-utopia, among them Jack London’s The Iron Heel." He goes on to draw analogies between We and H.G. Wells’ writings of the period between The Time Machine (1895) and The World Set Free (1914). Zamyatin’s novel, as Henry Gifford points out,4 "takes from Dostoevsky its main principle—that of the right to irrationality" (one thinks in particular of Raskolnikov or the hero of the Notes from the Underworld); the oppos­ ing force of the planned restriction of an ordered life is also an inheri­ tance from the same writer: "the blue-print for the Single State can be found in Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." R.L. Jackson, in his Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature,5 has also shown how much the dialectic of rational and irrational powers in We owes to Dostoevsky. Yet, at another level far divorced from that of influences, We can be examined in connection with a very different stream of literature. In a letter to André Gide, Paul Valéry once suggested that

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Descartes' Discours de la méthode could well serve as a model for a novel, for the time had come when someone should write about the life of a theory, rather than that of a passion. Zamyatin’s We and Robert Musil’s Young Törless belong to that small group of novels that have embodied abstract concepts symbolically into their subject matter. Neither We nor Young Törless has divorced the history of a passion, to use Valéry’s terms, from the history of a theory.6 Both have made the two forces combine to test another. 1984, on the other hand, is concerned—as, indeed, is most science fiction—with the end product and byproducts of scientific processes rather than with the underlying principles in abstracto. This latter approach demands both a more sophisticated character as a lens and a greater degree of cerebral participation on the reader’s part. The theory, in both Young Törless and We, is mathematics and the novels are concerned with the position of the subject in relation to the interpretation of reality. The turning point for both novels is the idea behind the square root of a minus number. I have taken, as a concrete starting point for this comparison, the juxtaposition of two classroom incidents. The first is in Young Törless, the short novel about an adolescent’s school experiences written in 1906 by Robert Musil. The center of interest in this passage is the problem raised in a mathematics lesson. For some days past he [Törless] had been following lessons with special interest, thinking to himself: "If this is really supposed to be a preparation for life, as they say, it must surely contain some clue to what I am looking for, too.” It was actually of mathematics that he had been thinking, and this even before he had had those thoughts about infinity. And now, right in the middle of the lesson, it had shot into his head with searing intensity. As soon as the class was dismissed he sat down beside Beineberg, who was the only person he could talk to about such things. "I say, did you really understand all that stuff?” "What stuff?" "All that stuff about imaginary numbers.” "Yes. It's not particularly difficult, is it? All you have to do is remember that the square root of minus one is the basic unit you work with." "But that’s just it. I mean, there's no such thing. The square of every number, whether it's positive or negative produces a positive quantity. So there can't be any real number that could be the square root of a minus quantity.” "Quite so. But why shouldn’t one try to perform the operation of working out the square root of a minus quantity, all the same? Of course it can't produce any real value, so that’s why one calls the result an imaginary one ..." "But how can you, when you know with certainty, with mathematical certainty, that it's impossible?" [pp. 97-98).

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The two schoolboys go on discussing the implications of imaginary numbers for some time, until the hero, Törless, comes to the conclusion: That sort of operation makes me feel a bit giddy, as if it led part of the way God knows where. But what I really feel is so uncanny is the force that lies in a problem like that, which keeps such a firm hold on you that in the end you land safely on the other side [p. 98].7

These words on the uncanny power behind the concept of irrational numbers have an ironic note, since earlier in the novel Törless had used all the logical arguments of an atheist to deride his friend’s belief in God. Turning to We, we find that the hero, D-503, also has his basic beliefs in the logicality of life put in question by the idea of an “irrational root" (p. 198). This also occurs during a mathematics lesson. This happened so long ago, during my years at school, when this befell me. Everything is so clear, so deeply engraved in my memory: sphero-hall flooded with lights, hundreds of round little-boy heads—and Plyappa, our mathematics instructor . . . One day Plyappa told us about irrational numbers—and, I remember, I cried, pounding my desk with my fists and wailing: "I don't want this square root of minus one! Take this square root of minus one out of me!" This irrational root had become ingrown as something alien, outlandish, frightful; it was devouring me; it could not be rationalised, could not be rendered harmless, inasmuch as it was outside any ratio [p. 198].e

The square root of minus one takes on, for the previously rationally orientated D-503, just as it does for Törless, an emotional quality of a very personal nature. It becomes something outside his consciously controllable image of the world. There is an open conflict with the former superego. When, like Winston in 1984, D-503 falls in love with a member of a resistance group and commits the crime of failing to report for work at the appointed hour, the square root of minus one becomes for him a symbol of his irrational behaviour. And now there was this V^T all over again. I have looked over my entries [the novel is made up of the hero's log-book entries in the interests of rational self-analysis] and it is clear to me that I was being foxy with myself, that I was lying to myself—anything not to perceive that VT” [p. 198].

A further point of close similarity between Young Törless and We is the way in which the Kantian concept of mathematical infinity is used as an image, an “Open Sesame" for both heroes to the caverns of the

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irrational, or rather the superrational. Again, as with the idea of the square root of minus one, the idea is both a reagent, as far as later developments are concerned, and yet at the same time symbolic of the seeds of antirationalism already within the characters. “Infinity!" Törless had often heard the word in mathematics lessons. It had never meant anything in particular to him. The term kept on recurring; somebody had once invented it, and since then it had become possible to calculate with it as surely as with anything real and solid. It was whatever it stood for in the calculation; and beyond that Törless had never sought to understand it. But now it flashed through him, with startling clarity, that there was something terribly disturbing about this word. It seemed to him like a concept that had been tamed and with which he himself had been daily going through his little circus tricks; and now all of a sudden it had broken loose. Something surpassing all comprehension, something wild and annihilating that had once been put to sleep by some ingenious operation, and suddenly leapt awake and was there again in all its terrifying strength [pp. 83-84],

Musil’s metaphor of being put to sleep by some ingenious operation becomes reality in We. Towards the end of the novel we hear that the Single State is now able to perform an operation, a “fantasiectonomy,” which removes that part of the brain that is responsible for the imagina­ tion or any manifestation of the irrational. To free himself from his conflict, D-503 undergoes this more physical kind of brainwashing. To appreciate the basic difference in conflict in the two novels, it is well to remember the times at which they were written. Young Törless is the product of turn-of-the-century Austria, when at least superficially the structure of society still functioned, even if it did suffer a great deal of fin-de-siècle unrest beneath the surface. We, written in 1920 in postre­ volutionary Russia, has an entirely different conception of society as a background. A Marxist, Zamyatin thought in terms of teleology and could project his warnings against ossification into the Single State one thousand years into the future in order to give his criticism of the poten­ tial weaknesses he perceived around him a strong historical framework. In Young Törless the conflict is much more personal and is devoid of such large social and historical dimensions, which were first to come with The Man Without Qualities. It is with this reference to the teleological background of Zamyatin’s novel in mind that we can turn to the way the concept of infinity is given a political twist in We. The Single State is explicitly founded on a mathe­ matically precise logic (Taylor’s Law of a planned program of daily tasks is one example of this logic). If mathematics is forced to admit the concept of infinity, then why does not the Single State allow for it? Using

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this argument, E-330, the resistance fighter to whom D-503 is so strongly attracted, asks him why the dialectic of progression—the strug­ gle between entropy and energy9—should ever end: ". . . you’re a mathematician . . . Even more—you’re a philosopher, because of your mathematics. Well, then: name the ultimate number for me." "What do you mean? ... I don’t understand—what ultimate number?” "Why, the ultimate, the supreme, the greatest number of all." “Come, E-, that's preposterous. Since the number of numbers is infinite, what number would you want to be the ultimate one?” "Well, and what revolution would you want to be the ultimate one? There is no ultimate revolution—revolutions are infinite in number. The ultimate revolution—that’s for children. Infinity scares children, yet it is necessary for children to sleep soundly at night" [p. 305],

D-503 is forced to admit that E-330 is theoretically right, but in practice he is unwilling to accept the implications. Törless accepts the view that life is “as if he must work out an unending sum in long division with a recurring decimal in it” (p. 87); D-503, on the other hand, decides to tear up all the calculations that go beyond the logic of empirical reality and has them erased by operation from his memory. But, despite the diffe­ rent solutions, the mathematical starting point of the two heroes' prob­ lems is very similar. For a third point of comparison, I have chosen the idea of a "soul,” the very antipode of the mathematical empiricism in which the two characters previously believed, and hence the motivating power behind the whole conflict. It is at this point of deliberation that the two heroes part, either accepting or forcibly negating this new-found irrational ele­ ment within them. In Musil’s novel, Beineberg, Törless’ school friend, brings up the idea in relation to the subject of irrational numbers. . . . that little peculiarity in mathematics, that example of the fact that our thinking has no even, solid, safe basis, but goes along, as it were, over holes in the ground—shutting its eyes, ceasing to exist for a moment, and yet arriving safely at the other side. Really we ought to have despaired long ago, for in all fields our knowledge is streaked with such crevasses—nothing but fragments drifting on a fathomless ocean. But we do not despair. We go on feeling as safe as if we were on firm ground. If we didn’t have this solid feeling of certainty, we would kill ourselves in desperation about the wretchedness of our intellect. This feeling is with us continually, holding us together, and at every moment protectively takes our intellect into its arms like a small child. As soon as we have become aware of this, we cannot go on denying the existence of the soul [p. 155],

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The hero’s thoughts at one point in We are comparable in essence, if not in mode of expression, with Beineberg’s diagnosis of Törless’ problem. But Zamyatin links the concept of “soul” with the more striking image ofV^L As he again identifies himself more and more with the superego imposed by the Single State, D-503 is more hostile than Törless to the thought of having a soul. It appeared to me that I was seeing, through some sort of thick glass, an infinitely enormous and, at the same time, an infinitely small scorpiod, with a hidden yet constantly sensed minus sign for a sting. But then, perhaps this was nothing but my soul [p. 248].

The root of minus one, infinity as a mathematical idea in relation to life, and the idea of having a soul, the three points chosen for a comparison between the imagery of the two novels, all occur here at D-503’s mo­ ment of genuine self-recognition. The mathematical symbolism in Young Törless and We differs greatly in nuance. In Young Törless the range of mood is narrower and does not admit a comic element. From the metaphysical question that iP raises for Törless, “Is it a universal law that there’s something in us stronger, bigger, more beautiful, more passionate than ourselves?” (p. 123), it can descend to a rationally heartless level of thinking, where the v thief, Basini, is seen as “a random creation outside the order of things”^ (p. 74). "People like Basini . . . signify nothing—they are empty accidental forms” (p. 78). The hero of We can also be callous in his objectivity when a numer­ ical appraisal of a situation involves treating people as if they were inanimate objects. For example, when ten people are accidentally killed by the exhaust of the rocket he is working on, he muses: Ten numbers represent hardly 1/100,000,000th of our One State; for the purpose of practical calculation this is an infinitesimal of the third order. Pity based upon mathe­ matical illiteracy was something that was known only to the ancients: we find it mirth-provoking [p. 252].

Yet the knife is turned, with an ironic distance reminiscent of one of Zamyatin’s favorite writers, Gogol; and we find the gropings of D-503 "mirth-provoking ” as he tries to rationalize his emotions upon falling in love with E-330. There was some sort of strange, irritating X about her, and no matter how much I tried I could not capture it, could not give it a numerical formulation [p. 172].. . This woman had the same unpleasant effect upon me as an irrational component which strays into an equation and cannot be analysed [p. 174],

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Poor D-503 realizes from time to time he is slipping: “Why, now I was living noi in our rational world but in the ancient delirious world consist­ ing of \AT’s” (p. 228). This account of the mathematical principles underlying the imagery of Young Törless and We is far from exhaustive. There are many exam­ ples left unquoted in Musil’s novel; and in We, where one can discern a closely knit pattern of mathematical images, one would need to quote almost the whole of the novel to illustrate the frequency of this mathe­ matical imagery. This is consonant with Zamyatin’s theories: "If I be­ lieve firmly in an image,” he wrote in an essay for the anthology, How We Write (Kak my pishem),w "it inevitably gives birth to a whole series of derivative images, it thrusts its roots through the paragraphs and pages.” Nothing could be truer of the mathematical imagery that occurs in We. It is largely due, it might be added, to this insistence of the numerical imagery that We achieves its satirical notes of anti-utopianism, "the quality of ironic humour” that Brown notes11 whereas with Musil the images are only one series of a number of gateways for Törless into the complexities of reality. There seems to be no reason why one should suppose a direct influence of Musil’s novel on Zamyatin’s imagery, even though the square root of a minus number is a striking idea to be incorporated into two novels of the same generation of writers. Although written in 1906, Young Törless was known only to a small group of admirers of Musil even in 1920. The imagery seems rather to be the result of the general mathematical interests of both novelists. Musil was trained as an en­ gineer and took a great interest in mathematics through his whole life. Writing with reference to Törless, Frank Kermode once remarked that if Joyce had "the mind of a grocer’s assistant. . . transformed by manic literacy, Musil’s is a mathematician’s mind similarly transformed.”12 Zamyatin, also a mathematician and engineer, lectured on marine architecture for many years at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. More interesting than any speculations on genesis, however, is the symptomatic way in which the accepted, traditional image of the “outsider” in German literature, or the so-called "superfluous man” in Russian literature, as being either a nobleman or an artist figure is enlarged by the pictures of the scientist learning—through the princi­ ples of his own field—the contradictions of the world he lives in, and the way this affects the vocabulary of the modern novel.

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Notes

1. New York, 1924. 2. See Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell. The Man and his Works (London, 1956), pp. 198 ff. 3. American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavists. Sofia, September 1963. Volume Two: Literary Contributions (The Hague, 1963), p. 38. 4. The Novel in Russia (London, 1964), pp. 162 f. 5. The Hague, 1958, pp. 150-157. 6.1 cannot agree with Brown when he says that "that philosophy [of We] seems... to have been an artificial intellectual superstructure developed in answer to the insistent demand upon writers—even by the most liberal of critics—that they take a definite ideolo­ gical position”; op. cit., p. 31. 7. Quotations from Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless are from the translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Young Törless (Harmondsworlh, 1961). 8. Quotations from Zamyatin’s My are from the translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney in An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period: From Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960), pp. 168-353. 9. Zamyatin has written an essay on this subject: “O literature, revoliutsii, i entropii," in Pisateli o literature i o sebe (Moscow, 1924). 10. Quoted from D.J. Richards, Zamyatin—A Soviet Heretic (London, 1962), p. 25. 11. Op. cit., p. 37. 12. “A Short View of Musil," Puzzles and Epiphanies (London, 1962), p. 95.

ZAMYATIN AND THE STRUGATSKYS: THE REPRESENTATION OF FREEDOM IN WE AND THE SNAIL ON THE SLOPE Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Forty years passed between the completion of Zamyatin’s We and the appearance of the Strugatskys’ first stories. In that span, few artisti­ cally interesting works of scientific fantasy were produced in the Soviet Union. The Stalinist “doctrine of limits" proscribed futuristic projecting beyond the fulfillment of the next Plan, and the literary experimentation of the twenties, when writers frequently played variations on Wellsian themes, was suppressed (Suvin, Metamorphoses 264). In its place came the socialist realist project novel. The cosmic struggles of the human species against “external” and human nature were replaced by the national struggle to modernize and collectivize, while fending off the agents of foreign enemies. With the repudiation of Stalin in 1956 came also the successes of the Soviet space program, the apotheosis of science as the only social practice not subject to ideological control, and the repudiation of the doctrine of limits. As if the liberation from the “cult of personality” had liberated them from terrestrial gravity, science fiction writers immediately set their hands to recovering the cosmic utopian tradition of the twenties. The first major work of the new style was Ivan Efremov's immensely popular Andromeda in 1958. In 1959, the best of Efremov’s followers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, began a career that has produced the most significant oeuvre of science fiction in the Soviet Union. Highly technological societies evidently require, and produce, a large and constant supply of quasi-mythic stories about the possible fate of the complex relationship between scientific culture and humane values. The history of Soviet science fiction differs from its Western counterparts, U.S. and British science fiction, because of the central role that a clearly defined philosophy of science plays in Soviet Marxism (Graham 9-23).1 Since Marxism-Leninism is held by Soviet ideologists to be both proven by science, and the full elaboration of the underlying laws of nature in social life, there is little leeway for pfaying with philosophical-scientific ideas or speculating on “other realities.” In se­ 236

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vere times, deviations from the official word on the nature of things or scientific practice are quickly construed as veiled attacks on the founda­ tions of Marxism-Leninism. As Soviet censors know very well, science fiction is an inherently critical genre. Even the Western pulp space opera that treats science as the magic of a corporate technocracy “unconsciously” criticizes actual science for not being magic, for not making our fondest wishes come true. In the West, this critical overtone may actually promote loyalty to the ideology of technological develop­ ment independent of social and political forces. But in the Soviet Union, science is not considered an autonomous force. For the Soviet state, Soviet science is a servant of Marxist-Leninist goals. The orthodox argument is obviously circular: science proves, and hence legitimates, the Soviet political order; therefore Marxist-Leninist political practice is the only scientific approach to reality. The writings of Marx and Engels, however, allow for a much more open-ended and dialectical concept of science (Graham 24-68). As a result, it is possible to write philosophic­ al speculations consonant with Marxism that are as critical of Soviet science as any right-wing tract. Speculation on the other realities by Soviet scientific fantasists inevitably draws attention to the disparity between the dialectical adventures of the human species promised by Marx and Engels, and the concrete practices of a repressive nationalis­ tic and bureaucratic elite. Zamyatin’s We adapted the Dostoevskian theme of defining hu­ man freedom in a world ruled by the ideal of the total rationalization of life to scientific fantasy. We established the new parameters of this theme, in the collision between two topoi: the One State, representing { totalitarian rationalization, and the Mephi’s world beyond the Green Wall, representing the desire for freedom. Just setting up the antithesis in these terms insured that Zamyatin’s book would be suppressed by the revolutionary authorities trying frantically to establish their legitima­ cy during the civil war and under extreme economic hardship. Later regimes also felt that Zamyatin’s shoe fit too well. Consequently, Zamyatin’s book has never appeared in the Soviet Union other than in samizdat; it was not even printed in Russian as a book until 1952, more than thirty years after its completion. The Strugatskys, by contrast, benefited from the liberalization of science under Khrushchev. They wrote comic fables, ao utopian socialists, idealizing the ongoing dialectical progress they believed would continue post festum, when terrestrial class struggle has ended, and humanity can turn its collective energies to its struggle with external nature (Suvin, "Introduction" 3—4). But with the post-Krushchev chill, and the repression of the liberal scientific establishment in the Brezh-

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r nev years, the Strugatskys also joined the tradition of speculating about scientific rationality as a way to explore the problem of freedom in a i despotic world. In their critical works of the mid and late sixties, the

Strugatskys adopted a paradigm similar to that of We. One work in particular, their first "underground" fiction, The Snail on the Slope, bears a striking formal, as well as thematic, resemblance to Zamyatin’s satire. Knowing this, we would nonetheless be right to expect great differ­ ences between Zamyatin's and the Strugatskys’ treatments. Zamyatin's work emerged from the avantgardisme and expressionism of the twenties. Zamyatin himself was a cultural phenomenon inconceivable v in contemporary Soviet society. The radical individualism he preached has little resonance in a culture that has taught two generations of its children to view individualism as a vice and the collective as the origin and goal of all value. We must also keep in mind that before they became critical writers, the Strugatskys were the most popular writers of scientific fantasy in Eastern Europe, the first writers to have been read in space, and the literary spokesmen for the scientific “generation of the sixties." They did not abandon the socialist utopianism of their early work; indeed, as Darko Suvin writes, their critical works can be read as parables of the Soviet intelligentsia’s struggle to maintain a utopian morality in an increasingly totalitarian world (“Introduction” 3-4). In the following pages, I will offer an analysis of the paradigm of the struggle between rationalization and freedom in We and The Snail on the Slope. Then I will attempt to show how The Snail on the Slope might be read as a critique of Zamyatin’s ambiguous representation of freedom, from the standpoint of the utopianism of the “generation of the sixties.” My argument has two parts. In the first, I offer a reading of Zamyatin’s depiction of freedom rather different from the usual reading: I will argue that the idea of freedom in We is purely formal, and therefore empty, and that We is actually a micromyth about the conflict between two aspects of determining nature outside human control and responsibility. In the second part, I will propose a way to read the Strugatskys’ novel as a response to Zamyatin, and an attempt to re­ solve the problem of the absence of freedom which appears to be implicit in the antithetical paradigm of the novels. The Strugatskys' resolution, I propose, will be the attempt to depict a dialectical third term: the committed intellectual.

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Zamyatin’s We has been justly considered the model of twentieth century anti-utopian fiction. In that book, Zamyatin set up the dystopian norm for future writers, by reversing the axiological terms of nineteenth-century utopian fiction. Modern utopias had represented the liberal vision of historical struggle. On one side of the conflict was despotism, associated with the arbitrary rule of individuals whose au­ thority derived from two quintessentially irrational sources, birth and force. On the other side was the (sometimes revolutionary) desire for freedom. For liberals from More on,2 the consummation of human free­ dom from feudal arbitrariness was the vision of a rational, equitable and peaceful social life for all humankind. In this way, the liberal ideal of the rationally self-ruled individual was conflated with millenialism, and synthesized in the vision of a rationally self-ruled society. Zamyatin turned this value-hierarchy upside down. We's One State is the fantas­ tic logical extension of a victorious naive socialism. The One State depicts the despotism of rationality applied to even the smallest en­ deavors of each member of the collective. The revolutionary Mephi on the other hand embody the counter-rational, counter-equitable, and counter-peaceful society of Nietzschean individuals.3 Zamyatin often expressed the idea that human history is one of oppositions and reversals, in which only the contradiction of accepted norms creates value. In We, Zamyatin illustrates the process through a dynamic “turn of the turn,” the reversal of the new terms (i.e., the identification of despotism with rationality and of freedom with irrationality) into inchoate, newer terms. This transformation sets the novel in motion. We observe the One State on the verge of collapsing under its own contradictions. The “integration of the ultimate equation of the universe” (We 1) has little future after D-503’s fantasectomy; since his genius is an aspect of his imagination, very little of the former may be left after the excision of the latter. In any case, one can doubt whether anyone will be left to appreciate the vision of the integrated happy cosmos after the mass lobotomization of the Numbers. By the same token, the Mephi may be in the process of “entropizing” itself. The organization of the nomads into a revolutionary shock force fighting for the abstract goal of freedom from totalitarianism may be the first step toward the inevitable transformation of the movement’s energy into entropy, foretold by I-330 (We 176). Zamyatin infuses these formal reversals of ideological antinomies with life by weaving political, sociological, and psychological ideas into a mythic web. He takes ostensibly distinct, and even contradictory,

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ideas from different realms of experience, and makes them aspects of the conflict between two informing, abstract essences, for which 1-330 gives thermodynamic names: "energy" and “entropy” (We 164). The One State embodies not only the totalitarian political state, but also the entropy of social thought, and "psychological entropy:” the incapacity for creative thought. By identifying mental entropy with the desire for happiness, Zamyatin makes even humanity’s intangible spiritual de­ sires reflect the same process as material social and physical tendencies. Each of these realms has entropy in common. In each, energy is so minutely hyperorganized that it cannot get out of its one steady state, and thus can no longer work for the progress of the species. The idea of energy implies the same identity of realms of experience. Politically, it is manifest in revolution; socially, in individualism; psychologically, in erotic desire and poetic inspiration; spiritually, in the desire for freedom. All share the natural world's “negentropic” effusion of organic life, the creation of new conditions. The threads are drawn so tight, that each action, image and ellipsis in D-503’s narrative reveals some aspect of the eternal collision of the two essences. In Zamyatin’s universe, impersonal material forces re­ place spiritual forces. Although they have physical names, they resem­ ble the oppositions-in-tension of Heraclitean metaphysics. Every aspect of human life is ultimately naturalized, by being made an aspect of physical (and hence, meta-physical) laws. Zamyatin constructed We as an ideological micromyth, in Levi-Strauss’s sense of the term myth: an ideal resolution of contradic­ tions perceived in reality, through their displacement into more man­ ageable oppositions (Structural Anthropology 224). Kathleen Lewis and Harry Weber have shown the extent to which We parodies the hyperbolic language of the Proletarian poets and A.K. Gastev, the poet and soon-to-be director of the Taylorist Central Institute of Labor (254-66). Zamyatin considered his sociofantasy to be part of an artistic-political polemic he was waging with the proletarian writers. He considered his work as a species of "warning literature” and he consis­ tently referred to the writer as an oracle, whose duty is to make the present aware of its possible evolutions, and to counteract the smug­ ness of the present. He considered the conflict of artistic wills and interests between the Proletkultists and the experimentalists as an im­ portant moment in the broader political conflict between philistine con­ formism and creativity. In We, this conflict is displaced to the level of metaphysical conflict between iron laws of the universe manifest in, and symbolized by, psychological, social and political experience. In dualistic myths, the two forces of the duality are seldom treated

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completely equally. Even though they are formally commensurate in power, one side is generally considered affectively more worthy of devotion than the other. In the eternal struggle of Zoroastrianism be­ tween the dark Ahriman and the light Ahura-Mazda, for instance, it is usually the latter to whom devotion is due. In We, as well, readers generally feel a strong preference for I-330 and the freedom party, especially in the conflict with totalitarianism that most readers take to be the villain of the book. When read closely with Zamyatin’s own pronouncements, it is tempting to interpret the conflict between the One State and the Mephi as a struggle between good and evil, true freedom versus false happiness, irrational-creative-life affirming passion versus dehumanized-deathly-mechanical tyrrany. Mephi good, One State bad; energy positive, entropy negative. Zamyatin himself invites this view in his essays of the late^eens and early twenties, where he sometimes warns of the threat of entropy, and sometimes announces the inevitabil­ ity of energy’s revolutions. But the dualism must not be ignored. Even though Zamyatin con­ stantly hints at the superiority of "freedom” over "happiness,” within the structure of We these affirmations are empty. For We does not repre­ sent freedom at all. Why so many readers consider the book to be a passionate defense of individual freedom deserves a discussion in its own right. In this space, I can offer only one possible explanation. Zamyatin's technique is characteristic of what has been called insinuat­ ing satire. This mode implicates the reader in making a satiric judgment on folly without that judgment ever being made manifest in the text. In essence, the reader is seduced, simply by trying to decode a highly indirect narrative, into recognizing the “correct” point of view. Zamyatin is a brilliant seducer. He plays on the reader’s need to supply the terms of passion ("freedom”)—eroticism, lust, primitivist nostalgia, poetic inspiration, etc.—from his or her own experience, in order to fill in the ellipses D-503 does not want to fill in, and hence to “complete” D-503’s character. Since it is the reader who must dig the names of these passions out of what D-503 keeps back and unnamed, the reader is seduced into co-operating with the story (i.e., accepting its assumptions) just as D-503 is seduced into co-operating with Mephi. As readers of the book, we have very little information for deciding whether, by identifying with D-503’s desire, we are gaining the “author’s” insight into the human condition (authoritative wisdom), or being used by the persona, “Zamyatin,” for the immediate polemical purpose of undermining the Taylorites and the Proletkult. Even if, as Lewis and Weber suggest, D-503 is a parody of the Proletkult artists in the way Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is a parody of the "men of the

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sixties” (275), we are still left uncertain about how to evaluate 1-330 and the Mephi. In the same way, as completers of D-503’s character, we have no way of determining whether 1-330 authentically cares for D-503 as a subject (an “I”), or whether her behavior is dictated by the overrid­ ing need to gain access to the Integral. As readers, we are kept active by having to fill in the narrative's ellipses, as D-503 is driven to fill 1-330’s gaps—both activities feel better than speculating on the deter­ mining forces of the world. Yet both Zamyatin and 1-330 may only be playing ironic games with our commitments. Given the indeterminacy of We’s narrative, we have no ethical or axiological basis for preferring the romantic revolutions of the Mephi to the totalitarian state, in spite of the distaste we may feel for the fantasectomizing One State. The two sides of the conflict are formally equal. The immediate success of the Mephi rebellion depends on the success 1-330 has in dominating D-503; and the suppression of the rebellion appears to depend on the Benefactor’s ability to do the same thing. We is a brilliant ironic title—for D-503 can never be an “I.” His identity is a function either of the State, or of 1-330. He is always “we." The power of the Mephi, no less than that of the One State, derives from its capacity to captivate the reader’s surrogate. As the physicalistic terms imply, "energy” and “entropy” refer to power, not to ethical values. The One State is beyond good and evil, just like the Mephi. And the Mephi's claim to freedom is as sham as the Benefactor's claim to do good. Rather than liberating D-503 from domination and encouraging him to develop his own autonomy, 1-330 and the Mephi offer him only another we-state. They provide him with an entrance into uncertainty, but with no way to choose. In his essays, Zamyatin liked to link his thinking with Hegel’s. He specifically associated his idea of the heretic who denies the present in the interest of the future with the move in Hegel's dialectic called the negation of the negation. Today is doomed to die, because yesterday has died and because tomorrow shall be born. Such is the cruel and wise law. Cruel, because it dooms to terminal dissatisfaction those who today already see the distant heights of tomorrow; wise, because only eternal dissatisfaction is the guarantee of unending movement forward, of unending creativity. He who has found his ideal today, has already turned into the pillar of salt as was Lot's wife, has already grown into the earth and moved no further. The world lives only by heretics: Christ the heretic, Copernicus the heretic, Tolstoy the heretic. Our creed is heresy: tomorrow is infallibly heresy for the today which has been turned into the pillar of salt, for the yesterday which has crumbled into dust. Today negates yesterday, but tomorrow is the negation of the negation: always the same dialectical path, which carries the world into infinity along a grandiose parabola. Thesis yesterday, antithesis today, synthesis tomorrow. (Quoted in Shane 23)

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At least in terms of We, however, Zamyatin’s invocation of Hegel is inappropriate. One important element of the dialectic is lacking in We: the progressive universalization of freedom. In what way the future foretold by 1-330 or Zamyatin’s heretic-prophets is freer than the present, Zamyatin does not say. He indicates only that it is ‘other’ than the present. Zamyatin's fascination with the contestation of social norms leads him to describe history as a process in which abstract forces oscillate in power; the ‘content’ of one becomes the other, but like Yeats’ gyres, they do not cease to be formally, and essentially, what they were from the beginning. They are always “conformity” and “contestation.” Movement into the future is not progressive here, in the dialectical sense. The achievements of Christ, Copernicus, Tolstoy—not to speak of 1-330 and the Mephi—do not increase the general freedom of humanity. On the contrary, Zamyatin implies that whenever their views are incorporated by the mass of “world-maintaining individuals” (to use Hegel’s phrase), their energy is dissipated: "all truths are false: the essence of the dialectical process is that today’s truths become errors tomorrow” (Quoted in Shane 23). The~ heretical figures are embodiments only of formal opposition, not car- > riers of freedom. Past, present and future are merely empty r abstractions. What gives value to Zamyatin’s great scientists and artists / is, ultimately, their mere formal opposition to the presents in which they/ lived. Opposition of heresy to orthodoxy does not by itself produce prog­ ressively more freedom; and We does not go beyond this unmediated opposition. Because Zamyatin does not really represent the negation of the negation, he does not represent the Hegelian dialectic, either. Rather than motivating synthesis—and the possibilities of ‘freedom’—by raising reality to a qualitatively new level, Zamyatin’s artist-scientist acts as an opposite eternally linked to that which it opposes. Hegel describes unmediated opposition like this: Positive and negative are supposed to express an absolute difference. The two however are at bottom the same: the name of either might be transferred to the other. Thus, for example, debts and assets are not two particular, self-subsisting species of property. What is negative to the debtor, is a positive to the creditor. A way to the east is also a way to the west. Positive and negative are therefore intrinsically conditioned by one another, and are only in relation to each other. The north pole of the magnet cannot be without the south pole, and vice versa. If we cut a magnet in two, we have not a north pole in one piece, and a south pole in the other. Similarly, in electricity the positive and negative are not two diverse and independent fluids. In oppositions, the different is not confronted by any other, but by its other. (Quoted in Graham 56-7)

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Unmediated opposition may create a universe of powerful transformations; but for Hegel and Marx both, freedom can emerge only with the transcendence of mere oppositions in society. Zamyatin provides only a return of opposition through an exchange of "content." The energy party and the entropy party exist in the same way. They have value only in relation to one another. They may exchange their "content,” but they will always exist formally as mutually defining opposites. To prefer one over the other is as absurd as to prefer a positive over a negative pole.4 We is not, then, a moral lesson about freedom in satiric guise. It is a micromyth about eternal, ahistorical oppositions that have little, if anything, to do with human responsibility or choice. The values attached to each side are results, not causes. In elaborating 1-330’s famous analogy of happiness and freedom to entropy and energy (We 165), Zamyatin shows how little responsibility this putative freedom provides: The law of revolution is not a social law. It is a cosmic, universal law—like the laws of the conservation of energy (entropy). Some day, an exact formula for the law of revolution will be established. And in this formula, nations, classes, stars—and books—will be expressed as numerical equations. ("On Literature, Entropy, etc.,” Ginsburg 107-8)

The terms in which the ostensibly anti-authoritarian polemic is cast preclude the notion of autonomy. Like the vulgar Marxists he opposed, Zamyatin claims only that history and culture will behave in such and such a way, not that one should behave in a certain way based on ethical considerations. This way of imagining political freedom bears an odd resemblance to the way Zamyatin’s powerful adversary, Gastev, expressed his vision of the totally rationalized utopia, which was one of the sources for Zamyatin’s One State. The mechanization, not only of gestures, not only of production methods, but of everyday thinking, coupled with extreme rationality, normalizes to a striking degree the psychology of the proletariat. It is this very feature which gives the proletarian psychology a striking anonymity, which allows one to qualify the individual proleta­ rian unit as A, B, C or as 325.075 and 0, etc.. . . The manifestations of such a mechanized collectivism are so alien to personality, so anonymous, that the move­ ment of these collective-complexes approach the movement of things so that it seems there is no longer an individual human being, but even, normalized steps, faces without expression, a soul without lyricism, emotion measured not by a cry or a laugh, but by manometer and taxometer.... In this psychology, from one end of the world to the other, flow potent massive streams, creating one world head in place of a million heads. This tendency will next imperceptibly render individual

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thinking impossible, and thought will become an objective psychic process of a whole class, with systems of psychological switches and locks. (Quoted in Lewis and Weber 259)

Although they begin from radically different positions, Gastev and Zamyatin both subsume human actions to physics, and an "objective psychic process.” It is plausible that Zamyatin formulated his revolu­ tionary hyperbole specifically to answer Gastev’s eschatology. If so, then in the heat of the polemic he expressed his position with the same mythopoeic scientistic premises as his opponent. In neither Gastev’s nor Zamyatin’s visions does individual, or even collective, responsibility for history play a part. Zamyatin wished to ridicule the machine-society of Gastev’s myth by subjecting the “paradise” of uniformity to the phy­ sics of conflict. He believed he was defeating mechanical statics with thermodynamics. The classical thermodynamics Zamyatin learned from Meyer, however, does not provide for freedom within the system. Whether Zamyatin presented freedom in this way in We because he did not think through the implications of his scientific analogy, or because he intended to create a thematic contradiction in the novel, is beside the point. (Even so, it is a very interesting question.)5 We is a rhapsody of interlocking oppositions; Zamyatin’s paradoxes are so acute that they destroy his protagonist. Entropy and energy are mutual­ ly dependent and defining concepts in the same universe of discourse; they form a duality, neither term of which is "free” of the other. In the same way I would argue, that Gastev’s Factory-State and Zamyatin’s “law of revolution” are also mutually dependent and defining concepts in the same universe of discourse. In the same way Zamyatin’s insist­ ence on the poetic artist’s role as a prophet creates a de-personalizing paradox. Against the Proletkult vision of a whole class as a single subject, Zamyatin extolls individualism without a subject. By inflating the poetic subject, which is the supposed incarnation of spontaneity and freedom, Zamyatin in effect arrives at the same deter­ minism—although by cosmic, and not human, laws. For the poet can only speak in accordance with iron laws. While Gastev depersonalizes the mass, Zamyatin depersonalizes the individual. I do not intend these remarks as denigrations of We. I consider the novel a great work. But not of humanism. Rather, I find it most intelligi­ ble as Nietzschean satire on the morality of mores. I wish only to show here that the antithetical topology of We presents problems in the repre­ sentation of freedom for writers like the Strugatsky brothers, who feel obligated to present their public with images of correct ethical action.

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Boris and Arkady Strugatsky came to immediate prominence dur­ ing the youth-centered literary exuberance of the post-1956 de-Stalinization. At first, they merely modified the conventions of socialist realist adventure fantasy for science fictional purposes. Their theme was the adventure of the dialectic, and their special talent was for imagining new dialectical oppositions (or nova)6 confronting the "thesis-world." They would focus on the personal dilemmas and cognitive ambiguities that even true-minded socialist humanists might face, simply because they are human. The Strugatskys’ ability to portray ambiguous philosophical-scientific situations was unprecedented in Soviet science fiction, and they often used the science fictional novum as a way to go beyond the doctrinaire limits placed on science fiction before them. They were among the first Soviet writers to depict nonhumanoid aliens, alien intelligences superior to the human, and even the catastrophic effects of scientific research not necessarily linked to the “negative science" of capitalism. In these early works, the Strugatskys represented the idealism of the confident, youthful corps of scientists and engineers, and the stu­ dents beginning their scientific educations, in the early sixties. For the generation of the Sputnik, science had become the consummate uto­ pian activity. Its methods seemed to embody the ideals of honesty and truthfulness, and hence the heroic humanistic challenge to the immoral­ ity of the personality cult and Lysenkoism. Its achievements seemed to be creating the material means for fulfilling the conditions of utopian life in the future. And its organization seemed to exemplify the ideal of communal work on an international scale. By the mid-sixties, however, the Strugatskys had become less interested in depicting heroic adventures of cognition in the external world of nature. They turned to the theme of the confusion within the social practice of science resulting from the bureaucratization of re­ search and the vitiation of science’s original utopian goals. Contempor­ ary models for such confusion were not hard to come by. The actual conditions of the Soviet scientific intelligentsia in the early sixties had fostered a double-bind. On the one hand, most of the Lysenkoite press­ ures to subject research to the power and doctrine of the Party were eased, and many scientific institutions were liberated, in a series of administrative reorganizations, from direct accountability to the Party. At the same time, Lysenko retained Khrushchev’s enthusiastic support, and the new scientific administrators doubted the lastingness of the reforms. The Party, moreover, which could never be ignored, continued

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to maintain that science was to be guided by the Party and its philosophers.7 The deposing of Khrushchev in 1964 (and of Lysenko immediately afterward) brought on a new series of "reforms” and a new double-bind. To limit further damage to the new leadership’s authority, and to insure efficiency after the debacles of Khrushchev’s “pragmatic” regime, con­ trols were tightened on the scientific institutions, and the Party gradually regained direct control over the scientific establishment. In reaction to the liberalization of Eastern Europe and its widespread support among Soviet scientists, the ideological correctness of scientists once again became a matter dear to the authorities. Thus, the repudiation of the ideological distortion of scientific theory (i.e., Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology” and the concept of “socialist science”) led paradoxically to the intensified repression of scientific practice, particularly the extension of censorship and the curtailing of foreign travel. Some highly respected academicians might protest the deepening reaction with the hope of moral support from the West. Most scientific workers faced quick and severe reprisals for ideological deviation. The cultural chill and enforced conformism of the BrezhnevKosygin regime came as a defeat for the generation of the sixties. Beginning in 1966, the Strugatskys abandoned their post festum topos and its idealism. Influenced by the Polish fantasist, Stanislaw Lem, and the newly translated works of Kafka, their fiction became less “extrapolative,” and increasingly “analogical” (Suvin, “Introduction” 5): they wrote less about the golden future of the species than about the present’s strenuous struggle to maintain its integrity. In 1968, at the height of their popularity, and under attack from influential conservative critics, the Strugatskys penned what Suvin has called their credo: “Each scientist must be a revolutionary humanist; otherwise the inertia of history will shunt him into the ranks of irresponsible scoundrels lead­ ing the world to its destruction” (Quoted in “Introduction” 19). The Snail on the Slope was the first of the Strugatskys’ works to be suppressed in the Soviet Union. It consists of two independent and complementary narratives, each of which was published once in the Soviet Union, and subsequently republished abroad in unauthorized editions.8 The tales are set, respectively, in a vast, archetypal Forest, and in the labyrinthine, fantastically bureaucratic scientific institute, the Forest Research and Exploitation Authority, known as the Directorate. The first tale tells of a romantic humanist named Pepper, who has come to the Directorate as a sort of visiting fellow. Pepper represents the literary intellectual. He is treated as a sad clown, brought in to entertain the aimless Directorate personnel with his idealistic antics. He

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approaches the Forest with a romantic's longing to commune with un­ mediated Nature; and he is partly right—the Forest does function as an inscrutable Other, resembling the mysterious sentient planet in Lem’s Solaris. The Directorate, however, with its absurd routines and all powerful but always absent Director, is not interested in learning about the Forest. It wants only to destroy the Forest’s mysteries. Unable to acquire permits to visit the Forest or leave the Directorate, Pepper finally abandons his hopes for a moral world-transformation through the Forest. He discovers one day that he himself has been made, inexplicably, the Director. He acquiesces to the tradition based ‘‘in the depths of time” of issuing at least one new order every day, including one proclaiming involvement with chance a crime. The second tale centers on Kandid, a microbiologist from the Directorate’s bioresearch station. After his helicopter has crashed in the Forest, Kandid is adopted and nursed back to health by a village of aboriginal Forest dwellers, who even provide him with a very young wife; thus they include Kandid in their society, even though they believe he is their mental inferior, a “dummy.” Most of the villagers appear to have lost their capacity for reflection, and live with no sense of the future or the past, perpetually repeating their words and acts. Kandid too finds he must exert great effort just to maintain a train of thought. This befuddlement seems to be linked to a mysterious transformation of the Forest’s geography and climate, which is known to the villagers as "the Accession.” In the course of a dogged journey to return to the biostation, Kandid discovers that the Accession is the present phase of a grandiose project to reshape the Forest and to destroy the Directorate, guided by the "splendid Maidens,” a society of former native women who have acquired the power of parthenogenesis. They also control various experimental life-forms, viruses, organic machines, zombies, and a mysterious lilac fog. Although they view men as an evolutionary mistake, the Maidens are not murderously hostile to Kandid when he stumbles on a “troika” of them near their strange omphalic city shrouded in a lilac fog. They believe he might be reeducated to serve them. But after his girl-wife has been taken off by her mother, now a Maiden, Kandid escapes and returns to his village. With a scalpel found on his journey, Kandid de­ fends his village from the zombie-like "deadlings" used by the Maidens to abduct the village women. He remains intent on returning home, but for the moment he accepts solidarity with the villagers who healed and nurtured him. Kandid acknowledges that the Maidens, with their tech­ nology and pure female communism, may be an evolutionary necessity. To resist them may be to resist natural law. But he decides

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that the values of human respect and compassion may demand pre­ cisely such resistance, the assertion of individual autonomy in the face of historical necessity. The allegorical topoi of The Snail on the Slope, the Forest and the Directorate, are familiar. They correspond to the antithetical worlds of We: the One State’s city of rationality and the florid wilderness beyond the Green Wall. Like We, The Snail on the Slope divides the world into two warring regions of force: a locus of “entropy”—self-enclosed, overrationalized, masculine, intent on subduing organic processes with technologies of control; and a locus of “energy”—fluid, organic, feminine, the source of the forces that will ultimately invade and disrupt the sterile order of utopia. Since We's city satirizes the ideal of a totally rationalized society, it retains some of the attractions of the ideal; it has its cool beauties, its radiant glass, its reflecting pavements, its ice-blue clarity. The Strugatskys’ Directorate, by contrast, satirizes the actual result of trying to enact this ideal.9 The Directorate is a Kafkaesque mess—always dark, muddy, and dusty. The Directorate’s ostensible object of observation, the Forest, is not even visible from it. Walls and buildings block the view at every turn. The staff is always in a muddle, fiddling with make-work. No one has any idea of what to do, beyond the abstract—and impossible—goal of eradicating the Forest. Nothing works right. Nothing changes. The real purpose of the Directorate is not to study the Forest, but to extend its patriarchal, bureaucratic authority over it, and to impose the reason of rationalization into the heart of Nature. (Resembling in this the goal of sending the rocket-ship Integral to far galaxies in order to subjugate their peoples to “the bénéficient yoke of reason” (We 1)). Even this goal is stymied by the bureaucracy’s obsession with its self-complicating procedures and the staff’s genius in evading them. Ultimately, everything in the Directorate is inspired by the desire to prevent change. The sign over the door in the Directorate’s office reads “No Exit." Zamyatin’s and the Strugatskys’ entropotopias share certain sym­ bolic qualities as well. Most important is the identification of entropy in both books with the putatively masculine desire to establish hierarchies, rationalize all processes, and to dominate Nature with technological violence. Zamyatin’s gender-typing leaves no doubt that the One State is absolutely partriarchal. The Directorate is also dominated by men.10 The Forest is a more difficult constellation of symbols to explain, for its allegorical significance is not clear. It might be read as the fluid ground of being, the source of all that changes according to the laws of nature and history, where new things are created and the old destroyed. Its fluid topography changes so quickly that Directorate's

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maps of it are always already obsolete. Its life forms are so plastic that there is no way to distinguish animal from plant, or even the animate from the inanimate. There is no determining the direction of the drastic natural metamorphoses that are constantly occurring. In both We and The Snail on the Slope, the forces of creative energy are associated with femininity: with 1-330 and the Maidens, respectively. Symbolically, this creative power is manifest in both books as female lubricity.11 The power of these feminine forces is in their ability to undermine male rationality, analogous in both novels with castration. In her role as femme fatale, I-330 is an archetypal vamp. D-503 never tires of alluding to her “bite smile” and association of blood. Her manipulation of D-503 to gain control of his rocket, in order to liberate the city (and perhaps even to blast it with the rocket’s burners (We 174)), underscores that the success of the Mephi rebellion de­ pends on the destruction of patriarchal power through a woman’s appropriation of its main symbol and tool. The Maidens' power is simi­ larly threatening to the association of male potency and positivistic science. But in The Snail on the Slope there is the significant difference that there is very little male potency left to threaten. The Maidens’ organic science is clearly superior to that of the Directorate’s men. The Maidens’ name for the Directorate, the “White Rocks” (Snail 182), is an appropriate metaphor for the sterile evolutionary vestige the Maidens are leaving behind.12 But there are other differences between the Mephi and the Maidens. Just as the Directorate shows that the entropy of the One State leads not to the beauties of a Crystal Palace, but to rotten banality, so the Maidens represent the glorious Nietzschean Mephi as a society of quasi-Stalinist projectors. Their forest transformation resem­ bles closely Stalin’s All-Union Program for the Transformation of Nature, which was to include changing the climate, eliminating deserts, and constructing gigantic water projects (Medvedev, Soviet Science 61-2). Their indifference to the Forest dwellers, along with the snatches of their rhetoric that Kandid catches (Snail 52), indicates that the Maidens are hardly the purveyors of universal freedom. By separating their work and society from the humanity of the past, the Maidens deprive the reader of the only source of intelligibility and meaning s/he has. For Kandid (and through him, the Strugatskys) the Maidens’ Forest represents not freedom, but unintelligible change. In The Snail on the Slope, the Strugatskys transmute Zamyatin’s transmutations. They too depict antithetical worlds of competing super­ powers closely associated with energy and entropy, freedom (to trans­ form nature) and happiness (in conformity). But unlike the world of We,

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in which, as I tried to show, the ethical deadlock is beneath the surface, the absence of morality and freedom in The Snail on the Slope is glaring. As we have seen, the Strugatskys consider themselves spokesmen for "revolutionary humanism.” They view their science fic­ tion in the Eastern European liberal tradition as a form of public literary-moral instruction. They attempt to solve the problem of moral circularity implicit in the two-world topology through a third term with no counterpart in We: Kandid, the image of personal autonomy gained through commitment. The character of Kandid allows the reader to construct a position simultaneously in the midst of things and on the sidelines of the super­ power conflict. At the novel’s conclusion, Kandid meditates on the amorality of the historical necessity that creates the Maidens and the Accession, and recognizes that he himself is not “outside morality” (Snail 242). The Accession confronts him with the choice between accepting pure necessity (and hence, pure power) and the perhaps quixotic solidarity with a nearly helpless humanity. Kandid suddenly recognizes that he has begun to view the world “from the side” (Snail 243), and this estranged point of view is the necessary issue of his existential estrangement from both power-centers. It is this alienation that provides Kandid with the conditions for a choice, the opportunity to exercise his autonomy. Thus, whereas We seduces and plays with the reader, ultimately reducing strangeness to interminable oppositions, the Strugatskys point to a place on the margin of oppositions. Suvin has called The Snail on the Slope an open-ended parable (“Introduction” 6). It is important to set this mode against Zamyatin’s myth of eternal opposition and exchange. For although Kandid cannot immediately influence the con­ flict between the Maidens and the Directorate, or save the old Forest society, he preserves traditional humane values while observing his antagonists. The conclusion of the struggle cannot be extrapolated from the conclusion of the novel—hence its open-endedness. But the presence of Kandid allows for the possibility, even if only the possibility, that human freedom may influence the future. In We, the physical-historical cycle allows for no future significantly different from the present. A tertium non datur holds. Kandid represents the possibility of synthesis. He is less than a force, yet curiously more complex than the Directorate or the Forest. He contains elements of both topoi. He originates from the biostation, which is on the cusp of the two. His specialty is microbiology, the study of the smallest beings’ relation to the living whole—a perspective sing­ ularly lacking both in the Directorate's bureaucracy and the Accession’s

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grandiose engineering. In a novel that foregrounds gender symbolism to such a degree, his status is peculiar. Although he is a man, he refuses to dominate women, or to be dominated by them (as Pepper is). In a world where masculine “hard” technologies wrestle with feminine “soft” ones, Kandid has his particular tool: the scalpel. Perhaps left specifically for him by a former male biostation colleague now serving the Maidens, the scalpel is conventionally associated with masculine attributes. It is inorganic and, of course, emphatically phallic. It is the symbolic tool of analytical reason, the knife with which organic tissue is cut to lay the interior bare, and for excising diseased tissue. Its immedi­ ate function for Kandid is the negative one of keeping the villagers from dying out. With it, he destroys the otherwise indestructible “deadlings,” and thus prevents the Maidens from abducting the villagers’ future. He is a counter-castrator, using a masculine tool to protect his community. Moreover, the scalpel is only a tool of small-scale defense. It is not an alternative to technology. It is only effective against one of the Accession’s vehicles, and probably has no power against swampings, viruses and the lilac fog. Kandid then can only preserve the autonomy of his own beleagured community, wait, and observe. He cannot stand as an alternative to the historical process that divides reality into two inhuman power blocs. He is neither revolutionary nor a power-protected positivist. Darko Suvin has interpreted the tales of The Snail on the Slope as parables about the two paths available to the modern intelligentsia. “In relation to the other human characters,” Suvin writes, “as well as to the overriding and unmanageable presences of the Forest and the Directorate, Pepper and Kandid finally come to stand for the two horns of an alternative facing modern intellectuals (as the text sees it): accommodation and refusal" (“Introduction” 13). I would add this to Suvin’s point. Pepper’s “accommodation” re-enacts D-503’s submis­ sion to the Benefactor. For Pepper, the desperate need for meaning and community, and his feeling of exclusion from the primal reality of the Forest, are so great that he is ultimately willing to accept the Direc­ torship as a surrogate. And the Directorate is perfectly willing to make submission palatable. By making Pepper its executive, the Directorate satisfies his need to be above the norm, without losing any of its actual power—which, in fact, lies precisely in its capacity to make the abdica­ tion of choice seem like the goal of freedom. Pepper is a parody of autonomy. Unable to find true reason, he settles for rationalization. Kandid, on the other hand, does not succumb to despair. His "refusal” is made easy by the fact that he has been forcibly and accidentally uprooted from his milieu. He enacts the role of the

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free-floating intellectual, whose interests correspond not to those of a particular class, nation, or sex, but to the ideal social life: utopia. Since the values of the ideal are based on the best qualities of the past selected from the chaos of history, Kandid is a “conservative”; his appropriate commitment is to the oldest “organic” culture in the novel, the villagers’. (It is interesting to note, in this regard, that Kandid’s tale can be read as a Mannheimian commentary on Lukacs’ ideas in History and Class Consciousness. The possibility of alliance with the “emergent class” is wide open for Kandid. The Maidens offer him the opportunity for a reorientation of his gifts; and there’s evidence that at least one of Kandid’s former Directorate colleagues (Karl Etinghof) has chosen that path (Snail 149-52). Instead, Kandid chooses to uphold ideal social and spiritual values and the actually existing traditional community. The Maidens’ Stalinist language and project leave little doubt that this emergent class is completely amoral, and absolutely hostile to the humanist ideal. From the Maidens’ side, since they are no longer completely “human," in the usual sense, the usual “humanism” means nothing to them.) The Snail on the Slope thus reverses the political-axiological rever­ sal Zamyatin had effected in We. The Strugatskys’ return to the liberal ideal, now seen as a limited, temporary holding pattern. When both the global forces of the superpower struggle are hostile to human freedom, the book seems to say, then the agent and locus of freedom must be the one that liberalism has traditionally maintained: the moral individual. This liberalism is not, of course, the possessive individualism usual in the West. It harks back rather to the pre-revolutionary Russian tradition of the socially conscious intelligentsia, which believed that it mediated between the masses and the ruling classes through its “disinterested” regard for truth in the service of the nation. But whether this moral of individual rectitude is effectively repre­ sented in the novel may be disputed. Few works of science fiction in any culture are as indirect as The Snail on the Slope. This obliqueness leaves unclear whether we can speak of an assertion of anything at all, or whether the novel is ultimately “about” the profound ambivalence and confusion of its own conditions of creation. One reads the novel with the feeling that the contradictions and problems of the Forest and the Directorate are not really intelligible at all—to anyone. Kandid’s humanism, the only element of rest and hope in the confusion, cannot compete in vividness with the grotesque transformations of the Forest's nature or the Directorate’s paralogisms. We pay less attention to Kandid’s hard-won tentative conclusion and Pepper’s “fall into power” (“Introduction” 13), than to the virtuosity of the Strugatskys’ incompre­

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hensible inventions and the psychoanalytic questions about the book's gender symbolism. Nor does the association of the quasi-Stalinist world-transforming project with historical necessity and evolutionary transformation give confidence that the authors themselves have much faith in Kandid’s defense of human values. This sense that the unintelligibility of the superpower struggle is the more interesting problem than Kandid’s resolution to the problem of freedom, is reinforced by the curious literary provenance of Kandid’s tale. The parabolic, science-fiction fantasy about confronting alien reali­ ties takes shape, ironically, in the venerable pattern of the liberal politic­ al novel developed by Walter Scott in his historical novels. Scott char­ acteristically treats the theme of the young representative of a new culture growing into moral and political awareness by participating in the collision of radically different historical cultures. The unremarkable hero usually allies himself, at first, with the culture fighting against his own native culture; or, alternatively, he is only thought to have joined “the other side.” In the course of the conflict, one side proves itself to be anachronistic, while the other—the hero's own—shows itself to be in­ tolerant and arrogant, even though it is historically necessary. In Scott’s plots, the romanticized archaic culture must inevitably perish, but the young hero usually learns to respect its ancient codes of honor. Through a marriage with a woman of the moderate faction of the other side, the hero symbolically synthesizes whatever still remains to be synthesized of the two cultures. The Strugatskys cannot have been unfamiliar with this mode. Scott’s work is highly regarded in the Soviet Union; it can even be argued that some of the formal models for socialist realist fiction derive from Scott’s technique of mixing sociological realism of background detail with a romance plot mythicizing the mergent social order.13 Many characteristics of this romantic historical realism are evident in The Snail on the Slope in displaced form. Rather than a conflict between two sociocultural value systems, The Snail on the Slope depicts the struggle of three worlds: the Maidens, the Directorate, and the villagers. Further, it is the "meta-organic” society of the Maidens that appears superior to the abstract relations of the Directorate. This reverses the historical hierarchy of Scott's mythology of the ascendance of the rationalistic bourgeoisie over “organic” feudalism. Kandid does not ally himself with the Maidens, even though the option is open to him. We see Kandid smack in the middle. If he is destined to return to the Directorate with a synthesis, we have no information about it. We only know that he has begun to gain the ironic perspective of the outsider. Scott usually goes on from there. His historical myths are all comic, for

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all the conflicts are resolved in a synthesis of sociocultural interests. The Strugatskys could not have allowed the conventional synthesis via marriage, with which Scott “synthesized” English liberalism and the ideology of conservative nationalism. No Maiden is likely to marry Kandid. The Maidens are, a priori, those who do not amalgamate the past; their parthenogenic chastity corresponds to the breaking of con­ tact with society. Thus there is nothing to make the emergence of the new evolutionary prodigies seem palatable, necessary and intelligible. While this open-endedness may create a sense of greater com­ plexity than Scott’s realistic comedy, in other ways it creates greater problems. The Strugatskys have the reader ally with a positive hero, capable of existing outside his conditions. He carries rectitude in his heart, while the world disintegrates around him. His determination to return to the Directorate may be a vestige of the original tale, which appeared in 1966, and thus may have preceded the completion of Pepper’s tale (which appeared two years later).14 But whatever the issue might be for Kandid, the reader, who has been privy to Pepper’s story, knows that the Directorate has nothing to offer in opposition to the Accession. Kandid is consequently a character without any other possi­ ble home than homelessness. In proposing a moral, however tentative, the Strugatskys depict profound ambivalence. While they represent the density of a fantastic reality with great inventiveness, they do not achieve a moral design. They leave their moral agent "lost in the Forest.” Not until their masterpiece, Roadside Picnic, in 1972, do the Strugatskys master this ambivalence, by allowing themselves to be carried with it into complete uncertainty. Zamyatin did not encounter these problems. The moral-political message of We is only one aspect of the myth of the eternal conflict of energy and entropy, which Zamyatin writes with brilliant economy. While the Strugatskys write about global confusion, and create confu­ sion while representing it, Zamyatin created a myth of the conflict of forces destined to act eternally in the same way—a destiny that invites artistic clarity and brilliance, if little moral and political guidance.

Notes This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Utopia and its Discontents: Zamyatin, Orwell, Mayakovsky conference held at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in April of 1984.

1. Other works of importance on the subjects are Popovsky, Buccholz, and the two books by Zhores Medvedev.

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2. The inclusion of More in the company of liberal Utopians bears some explanation. More's Utopia is more ironical and indeterminate (if such a modern phrase may be used) than its descendants. I do not think a sound case can be made now for More's advocacy of utopian social relations. But liberal and socialist advocates of utopia who come after More consider him their precursor, which has led to detaching Utopia from its complex social and literary context. More was, of course, neither anti-clerical nor anti-feudal per se. The strongest critiques of arbitrariness in Utopia are levelled against nascent capital­ ist landowners who enclose their lands. On the ideology of liberalism, see Mannheim 219-29 and Ruggiero. 3. Zamyatin considered Nietzsche—along with Dostoyevsky and Schopen­ hauer—one of his models ( “On Literature, Revolution, etc." Ginsburg 110). It is surprising that so little has been written about Nietzsche’s influence on Zamyatin and We, which can be easily interpreted as a fable of Nietzschean problems. Also interesting in this respect is the Strugatskys' ambivalent fascination with the amorality of evolutionary prodigies, who are nonetheless justified in their contempt for the deadly conformity of philistine civiliza­ tion (the Maidens in The Snail on the Slope, the Zursmansors/“slimies" of The Ugly Swans (1972), and the Visitors of Roadside Picnic (1972)). The whole of twentieth-century science fiction might in fact be read as an ongoing commentary on Nietzschean philosophy. (One need only think of how many major science fiction writers have treated the theme of superman/superwoman: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Bester, Sturgeon, Stapledon, Dick, LeGuin, Russ, Efremov, Savchenko, Snegov, Lessing, Kubrick, Spielberg, the list goes on). 4. In this context, I want only to show that neither Zamyatin's conception of the dialectic, nor his conception of freedom are consonant with Hegel’s philosophy, and that the invocation of Hegel is a sign of the philosophical immaturity of Zamyatin's thinking about freedom. A more interesting question, for another context, is the closeness of Zamyatin’s satirical notion of “happiness" exemplified by the One State to Hegel’s con­ ception of "freedom" as the full self-conscious rational self-determination of the individual in accordance with objective laws and institutions that are rational and universal. See Richard L. Schacht, "Hegel on Freedom," in MacIntyre (289-328). 5. We is particularly interesting for contemporary criticism because of the obvious split between its formal-psychological information and the social-political information. Zamyatin may well have been aware—even if only to ignore—that basing a fiction on paradoxes cannot yield any other message than paradox. One need not invoke the language of deconstructive criticism to show that We’s schizophrenic journal-narrative can never be reconciled through a “holophrenic" point of view. It is in the nature of the book's cosmos—because it is inscribed in the narrative technique—that the duality can­ not be dissolved, or even balanced. And yet, not even the plot can be deciphered without the reader positing precisely such a point of view transcending the flux of oppositions. Even the title breaks itself free of decideable meaning. "We" can be taken to properly signify any number of distinct combinations of "consciousness:” D-503 and the One State, D-503 and I-330, I-330 and the Mephi, D-503 and “the reader," "the reader" and “the author," “the reader" and "the critic," etc. This relentless shifting simultaneously enables interpretation (since meaning must be shared) and satirizes it (since every we-state in We is based on ego-less self-subjugation to power). The analagous relentless shifting of interpretations of the text, from the acceptance of responsible “authority" to a recognition of a responsible duality and back again, generates the ideological contradic­ tions inscribed in the novel as the (moral?) superiority of freedom/energy over happiness/entropy versus the formal equivalence (in power) of energy and entropy. Be­ cause Zamyatin never does define or represent freedom, however, the opposition be­

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tween the two value-structures is less “in the text" than between the reader’s desires and the novel's pseudo-cognitive myth. 6. The best application of Ernst Bloch's idea of the novum to science fiction is Suvin's discussion in Chapter 4 of Metamorphoses. 7. For discussions of the administrative reforms of the sixties, Medvedev, Soviet Science Chapter 7, and Greenberg. 8. According to Diana Greene, the two stories do not appear together before Myers' English version. Possev (Munich) republished Pepper's tale under the title Ulitka na sklone (The Snail on the Slope) in 1972. Kandid’s tale was republished by Ardis (Ann Arbor) in 1981, under the title Les. When the Kandid section appeared in 1966 for the first time in the anthology Ellenskii sekret, "the Strugatskys described this part as 'fragments’ of 'the novella [povest'] on which we are presently working,' and explained that the completed work might 'appear unusual because essentially it represents, as it were, two novellas in one and contains two totally independent plots.’" Greene 2-3; 18. 9. The Directorate may also stand for the actual cities of reason developed by Khrushchev in the late fifties and early sixties, the so-called Science Cities, like Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, where over 60,000 scientists, technicians and support staff were emplaced in an effort to centralize research and development. The Soviet press hailed these Science Cities in language resembling D-503’s panegyrics at the beginning of We. Popovsky provides an example, from a report by one of his colleagues, Yuri Krelin, on a visit to Akademgorodok in 1968. As you drive around the city you marvel and rejoice at the beauty of everything—the houses among the conifers, the central complex consisting of the hotel, post office, shops and film theatre. All round the outskirts are delightful-looking villas inhabited by academicians and doctors of sciences. And the institutes, the nerve centers of the place, are beautiful too. It is hard to say what is so attractive: the buildings are the same as elsewhere in the country, the homes, shops, and places of work are no different, but everything is beautiful nevertheless. It may be because of the woods, or because you feel that all these common everyday houses are blessed with a spirit of their own—a sense of truth and of the future, a spirit of science and of the intellect. . . . You walk about the city, into the shops and among the crowds—yet “crowd" is the wrong word. ... I have never seen such an almost unbroken succes­ sion of intelligent, sensitive faces. The feeling grew on me that every woman I saw was beautiful and that the men were all clever, athletic, and handsome. [Quoted in Popovsky 160], Ironically, by 1968, many of the science cities were becoming alienated compounds, ridden with alcoholism and class discrimination. A hotbed of protest against the show trials of dissident writers and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Akademgorodok was pulled to a short leash in 1970, and placed under the municipal supervision of Novosibirsk, thus losing its autonomy. (Popovsky Chapter 7; see also Medvedev Soviet Science 75-7). 10. In We, there are only four women characters (including the first dissident in Entry 22, whom D-503 mistakes for I-330). Two of these are "dissidents" (I-330 and the false I-330); one 0-90, ultimately defies and leaves the One State to bear her illicitly conceived child. The only woman upholding the city's laws is U-, and she is a woman manque. She is associated with repressed sexuality (she is unable to tell the difference between a threat of sex and a threat of murder) and perverted motherhood (she believes cruelty is the greatest show of love for children). The Benefactor and the Guardians are men; and the ultimate symbol of state power is the phallic rocket, the Integral. The only

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vaginal-uterine (or even simply curved) object of state is the Gas Bell, an instrument of torture. At the Directorate, there is an ethic of violently subjugating women sexually (exemplified by the driver Acey's nostalgic reminiscences of rape), corresponding to the researchers' desire to rape the Forest. Furthermore, the Directorate's few women (most of whom occupy markedly servile positions in the hierarchy) seem to have internalized the male dominance in sinister ways. The best analysis of the grotesque gender-typing in The Snail on the Slope can be found in Greene. 11. l-330’s power is not just fluid, it is liquid. She is associated with sap and fiery sexual juices, with red blood and green liqueur. The Maidens carry this association even further. They effect parthenogenesis in steaming, amniotic lakes; in their experimentation, they particularly favor "swamping” previously dry areas, or submerging villages under lakes; they make the atmosphere extremely humid; and their most powerful weapon is the lilac fog (doubtless a cousin of D-503's yellow fog). The Maidens make the Forest so liquid, it invariably swallows the Directorate’s exploratory phallic machines (e.g., Kandid's helicopter, Acey's motorcycle). Unlike Zamyatin, the Strugatskys depict this female lubric­ ity as repulsive and threatening. Greene 9-12. 12. For all its political and sociological interest, the most interesting aspect of The Snail on the Slope may be its gender symbolism. Few non-feminist works foreground sexual politics in such an elaborately displaced way—all the more interesting, in that the authors may not have been aware of the political dimension of their representation of women and men. It is plausible that, in their desire to describe rationally indecipherable phenomena, they "allowed” themselves more unconscious symbolism, including uncon­ scious valuations of sexual relations, than they might have otherwise. (There is a prece­ dent for such a practice: Stanislaw Lem's Solaris was also written "unconsciously” (correspondence with author) and also reveals a deep ambivalence about the relations of men and women, through the love affair of Kelvin and Rheya.) 13. Georg Lukâcs' admiration for Scott is well-known. See The Historical Novel 30-63. 14. A question perhaps only the Strugatskys can answer is whether the Kandid and Pepper tales were written simultaneously and only published two years apart, or whether the stories' appearances roughly coincide with their completion. If the latter is the case, it has a significant bearing on the interpretation of the book as a whole. In 1966, the year Kandid's tale appeared in Ellinskii sekret, many people in the Soviet Union perceived a power-struggle between the "moderates” and the hard-line Stalinists for the state and party leadership. This fear of "re-Stalinization" may have inspired the depiction of the "splendid Maidens.” By 1968, the year Pepper’s tale appeared in Baikal, the Strugatskys had clearly become demoralized about the regime’s measures to suppress the influence of European humanist Marxism on the Soviet intelligentsia—which led ultimately to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the same year. If the two tales were completed two years apart, it is possible that Kandid's hopes from the Directorate were originally intended as a glimmer of hope, a true destination for the intellectuals in a city of reason. Pepper’s tale, of course, depicts the Directorate as a version of Kafka's Castle, and thus transforms Kandid's hope into dark delusion.

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Works Cited

Buccholz, Arnold. "The Role of the Scientific-Technological Revolution in Marxism-Leninism.” Studies in Soviet Thought 20 (1979). Ginsburg, Mirra, ed. A Soviet Heretic. Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Graham, Loren R. Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf, 1972. Greenberg, Linda Lubrano. “Soviet Scientific Policy and the Scientific Establishment.” Survey August, 1971. Greene, Diana. "Male and Female in The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers.” Boris and Arkady Strugatsky: A Collection of Critical Essays (Starmont, 1988). Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. New York: Berkley, 1971. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Lewis, Kathleen and Weber, Harry. "Zamyatin's We, the Proletarian Poets, and Bogdanov’s Red Star." Russian Literary Triquarterly, 12 (1975). Lukâcs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Boston: Beacon, 1963. MacIntyre, Alasdair, ed. Hegel. A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1972. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, no date. Medvedev, Zhores. The Rise and Fall of D. T. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. ______ Soviet Science. New York: Norton, 1978. Popovsky, Mark. Manipulated Science. The Crisis of Science and Scientists in the Soviet Union. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979. Ruggiero, Guido. The History of European Liberalism. Boston: Beacon, 1959. Shane, Alex. The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Strugatsky, Boris and Arkady. Roadside Picnic. New York: Pocket, 1977. ______ The Snail on the Slope, transi. Alan Myers. New York: Bantam, 1980. _ ____ The Ugly Swans. New York: MacMillan, 1979. Suvin, Darko. “Introduction" to B.&A. Strugatsky. The Snail on the Slope. New York: Bantam, 1980. ______ Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. transi. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Avon, 1983.

NEW ZAMYATIN MATERIALS

THE PRESENTISTS Evgeny Zamyatin

The Futurists are dead. There are no more Futurists: there are Presentists.1 It is true that they still call themselves Futurists, and that a “Futurist Gazette” was recently published in Moscow, but this is nothing more than the last swing of momentum. The same momentum which forced the Bolsheviks to steal the venerable name of socialists and democrats for such a long time, until having such a name became absolutely indecent for them. Most likely, the Futurists will soon con­ vene a Futuro-Congress of Futuro-Soviets and announce: "Henceforth we are Presentists. Indeed, from the newspapers of the former Futur­ ists it is indisputably clear: for them futurum has become praesens, the future—the present; their beautiful “Somewhere-out-there ” has been found, and it is our present, mighty, glorious, noble Republic of Soviets. Indeed, it is now in particular that the “days of freedom for all,” the "sunny days of freedom” (an article in "Proletarian Art”) have arrived. Now in particular it is clear to everyone: "the joyous light of freedom has spread everywhere” ("Address to Young Artists” by Burlyuk). Now in particular we have at long last lived to see that happy time, when Our valiant Life, like an ocean’s wing, Has spread simply-miraculously-very simply. (“Stenka Razin," V. Kamensky)

And truly: Does not everything take place very simply in the Somewhere-out-there discovered by the Presentists? So goodnaturedly and simply, as people do swatting at mosquitoes; so good-naturedly and simply, pulling chunks out of Russia as they would from a free pirog. If only somewhere, even in a dog house, there would remain that happy, free, Somewhere-out-there. Until the Futurists became Presentists, one could admire them as the Don Quixotes of literature. If Don Quixote happened to be funny—his funniness was beautiful. The mop-headed quality of theirs, their recalcitrance and their very absurdity were all fine: all of this was stormy youth and genuine rebellion.

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But that was the Futurists. The Presentists, however, long to wear on their forehead a formal stamp: “Comrade-pioneers of proletarian art, pick up and try at least two books: Mayakovsky’s “War and World” and Kaminsky’s "Stenka Razin,” and we are convinced that you will com­ mand the People’s Commissar Soviet to publish millions of copies of these public books in the name of the triumph of proletarian art.” The Futurists in their “Manifesto” demand the “destruction of pri­ vileges and control in the area of art." But in this same "Manifesto" the Presentists in Red Guard fashion are checking the trustworthiness of the authors: “As before, the theaters are staging ‘Judean’ and other 'Kings’ [the works of the Romanovs].” Henceforth, only the poorest peasants have the privilege of writing and staging plays: right? And only from the courtly life of the—people’s commissars? The Presentists, employing the style of the "Red Gazette” and the Red-Gazetteered Blok, cry out in their “Manifesto”: “October has thrown the bomb of Socialist Revolution beneath the feet of capital. Far off on the horizon appear the fat asses of the fleeing factory owners.” The Futurists would not hesitate to complete this picture with the figures of the people’s commissars, longing to shake hands with these fat asses (see Lunacharsky's interview). And the Futurists would know that a fat ass is not the face of just the “fleeing factory owners," but that a fat ass is the face of every proprietor, for man does not beautify his environment, but environment beautifies and remakes the man.2 The Futurists, of course, would give this “face” a wonderfully con­ temptuous kick, but the Presentists would kow-tow to the proprietors: “You who have taken up Russia’s heritage, who will become (as I believe) the proprietors of the whole world, of you I ask this question: With what fantastic buildings will you cover the sites of yesterday’s fires? . . . You realize, for our necks, for the necks of the Goliaths of labor, there are no suitable sizes in the garderobe of bourgeois collars” (“An Open Letter,” Mayakovsky). For the Futurists, truly, there were not suitable collars, and only for the sake of constant rebellion against traditional clothes did they wear the yellow jackets of uniforms and words. The Presentists chose the cast-off clothes of the "poorest peasantry,” dressing up in decrees and printing “Decree No. 1 about the democratization of art: dirty literature and indecent art.” The Futurists created style, the Presentists follow style. With the Futurists, everything was their own; with the Presentists, it was already an imitation of the government samples, and, like every imitation, their decrees could not, of course, surpass the divine, charm­ ing stupidity of the originals. And was it worth it for the Futurists (today's Presentists) to take

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part in this competition? Indeed, the Futurists had Mayakovsky, but this was a very talented one, who created his own unique, weighty, coarse poetic music, a parallel to the music of Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite” (see Mayakovsky’s “Our March” in the newspaper Futurist Gazette). The Futurists had quite a vernal, spontaneous person with V. Kamensky, in his “Kolibaiki” and his “Zemlyanka.” The Futurists were always unique, and this was their greatest strength. Why in the world do the Presentists want to be like the thousands of others? The Futurists ran as a crowd; why in the world do the Presentists run behind the crowd? So our lives pass so quickly that the Futurists have already grown old, already grown tired of being unique, already become impo­ tent in rebellion and are rotting with the senile passion of the “urtsing” to the embraces of Lunarcharsky? Are the Futurists sharing the fate of the Russian Scythians who have begun to live a peaceful, sedate life? Is it really flattering for the Futurists to drink from one cup with the old man they have met, Heironym Yasinsky?3 Do the Presentists really need to remember Burlyuk’s lines ("My Friends”): It is not you, perennial toadies, Who challenge the world to quarrel.

Translated by Joe Denny [“Delo Naroda” No. 9, March 31, 1918, p. 4 signed Mikh. Platonov]

Notes

1. In translation: Futurists = "those who will be," Presentists = “those who are." [The Russian here is futuristy-budushchniki, presentisty-nastoiashchniki. Trans.] 2. A twist is given to the Russian proverb: “Environment does not beautify the man, but man his environment." 3. Yasinsky—a nineteenth-century naturalist novelist, one of the first established writers to join the Bolsheviks after 1917.

FOUR LETTERS TO LEV LUNTS Evgeny Zamyatin

Zamyatin knew Lev Lunts as a pupil in his literary studio (1919-20) and thereafter as a member of the Serapion Brothers. In June 1923, Lunts left Russia to seek medical treatment and see his parents, who had emigrated to Hamburg. He spent the summer in a sanatorium near Frankfurt and then returned to Hamburg, where he stayed in the uni­ versity hospital. He died there on 10 May 1924. During his 11 months abroad, Lunts corresponded with friends in Russia and received many letters from other writers. All of these were kept over the years by his sister Genia Hornstein (née Evgeniia Lunts). In 1966, 52 letters from the correspondence were published in Novyi zhurnal (New York) Nos. 82 & 83. Among them were 4 letters from Zamyatin, translated below. The originals are kept in the Lunts Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University. G.K.

1.

St.P.1 13-XI-1923

Hamburg. Eppendorferkrankenhaus. Herrn L. Lunz. Dear Lev Lunts. In the first lines—I very much love you—although you have forgotten the great Russian language: one cannot (as you) write “liubeznaia metrsha”—there is no such word, but one must write “liubeznaia metressa” (who greets you).2 And second: I cried over your ashes when I read your letter. I felt so sorry for you, so sorry: smoking is forbidden! Without smoking, we tobacco-fiends are ashes. I smoke up no less than a fourth of my riches—and so I’ve scrib­ bled something else. During the summer and autumn I wrote two stories. One is big, about two printer’s signatures—it's hard, damn! (dramatis personae: a worm, muzhiks, Red Army men, creatures on a

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certain star; title: “Story About the Main Thing”).3 The other is small, but indecent, like "Erasmus” (written in the summer, and in the heat—as you know—the lecherous demon is strong)4 And also—an article (“On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and on Other Things”).5 I think that this article will prove to be a camel (Voronsky—the article is for “Krug”—will be the eye of the needle).6 As for my novel, the censorship has "disastrously sat” on it—archpriesto-avvakumily speaking; so for the time being it will appear only in English (probably in November) in New York.7 I am preparing to emulate the great Lunts—and soon I will sit down to write a play. It’s shameful that "Outside the Law”—turned out to be outside the law: a good play, God grant good health to the author! My innocence and morality are very carefully guarded, and there­ fore I regularly do not receive letters from abroad—so I did not receive your first letter. Write via Lidochka.8 Without your supervision Nikitin has completely sonofabitched something, Zoshchenko has extolled himself; Slonimsky and Fedin are flowering.9 Fedin, evidently, does not want to get stuck at a "transfer station,” as I predicted he would in my article.10 About this article of mine—Sventsitsky said some curses in the supplement to “The Red Gazette”: he took offense on behalf of Semenov.11 Metressa, I, Mishka and Rostislav—await your letters.12 E.Z.

Dear Lev Natanovich, well, will you be coming to us soon? Your play “Outside the Law” is being taken by the film studio “Rus’.” A copy of the play was sent to Moscow.

L.Z.132

2. [1 Feb. 1924]

Dear Lunts. What Fedin read—your work—today—was very good.1 Maybe you are lying down, but you’re not standing in the same

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place. The Serapions are sitting—in a mess: Alphonse sat them there. Let them tell you themselves.2 Kisses. Metressa—also

E.Z.

3.

St.P. 21-11-1924

Dear famous European Lunts! We Asiatics are flourishing: the other day Tikhonov1 arrived from Moscow and brought permission for a journal—fat like Shchegolev. The name for it: “Russkii Sovremennik.” On the editorial board: abroad—Gorky, in Russia—Tikhonov, I, A.M. Efros and maybe Chukovsky?2 Publication is irrevocably private. For four days already I have been sitting up to my ears in manuscripts and conferences on the journal, I’ve forgotten what snow smells like. The first No. will come out at the end of March: “Reminiscences of Lenin” by Gorky and a story by him; maybe—my novel (if they wind it through all the barriers); stories by Leonov (a very good writer, sticks up his nose at the Serapions), Pasternak and Pilniak; letters of Dostoevsky, memoirs of Stanislavsky; articles by Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Tynianov, Radlov, A. Benoit und . . . And at the end—"Panopticum Pathetic" (“Revealed panopticum pathetic”—Blok)—to be honest, it’s merry. The Panopticum will be managed by Prutkov, Rastopyrka or some other personage;3 you, Lunts, should be the nose, finger, phallus—whatever you want in this personage. I heard your anniversary epopee to the Serapions—it was superb. In the “Panopticum” will be placed the apt utterances of great and small people (such like “horseshoeing all four feet”), there will be literary parodies, a fantastic literary chronicle and so on. Add your bit, Lunts. Afterwards: there will also be a serious literary chronicle (after “Panopticum”)—about Russian lit. and art—give material for this. Also: articles from you of the "Querschnitt” type may appear, short, sharp—2-3 pages each; send them. And finally: a story, play.—Good health to you and don’t cultivate gigantic fingers.4 The story about Nik. Nik. and how the Serapions got in a mess—you probably know. Write. E.Z.

Four Letters to Lev Lunts (1923-24)

269

Greetings and love from me, Misha and Rastopyrka! We remem­ ber you always and regret that you are not with us. Get well soon and for good and come back to Russia. Life is boring somehow, there are no good books, no theater, it’s empty. L.Z.

4. [Leningrad. 7 May 1924.]1

Great Lev Lunts!

Before me lies issue No. 1 of “Sibirskie Ogni” for 1924, in it—an article by la. Braun about the “troupe of Serapion Brothers"—and about the great Lunts, of course, about “Outside the Law” and “Bertran de Born.”2 Is it known to you, citizen, that your “Bertran” was announced in the repertoire of the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater for next season? I must confess that this happened against all my wiles, for I insistently tried to convince the Boldrama that “Bertran” couldn’t stand comparison with "Outside the Law” and advised that precisely “Outside the Law" should be staged. To this I received the answer that "Outside the Law” actually is outside the law, and here nothing may be written.3 Irritated by the failure of my designs, and likewise by the scent of the laurel leaf emanating from you, I decided to copy you, great Lunts—and soon I will be delivered of twins: I’m writing two plays, one for the 1st Studio of the Moscow Art Theater, the other—maybe for them, but maybe for somebody else. One play they forced me to write with the threat that they would break up my “Islanders” and draw out of it a play; for the other I myself committed the larceny by breaking up Leskov—from this piece, it seems something very funny will come.4 And after this—we’re contemporizing. Not an easy business. A precious child looks at you with the eyes of a gazelle—ah, if only you could cover her with kisses—but instead you hand her back her manuscript. Or this: how can you write to the beloved Lunts, what has happened to the play begun during his journey on a hospital bed—can’t anything be done? As for the “Journey”—write it and send it; I think it will turn out interesting—and not outside, but within the law.5 So then . . . incidentally, "so then” is a plagiarism: this is Misha’s formula—invariable—when he has sat out his time with me, he pre­

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pares to leave, glances at his wristwatch: “So then. Time to get moving.” And he knows that I know this formula, and every time he suffers unbearably—for he can't (for a whole year already) think up a new formula. Unfortunate canonist!6 Fedin is occupied with pediculture and a novel. Between Nik. Niki­ tin and the brothers coitus, it seems, has been smoothed a bit. Whereupon farewell. Metrsha, Misha and Rostislav send their regards. Your E.Z.

Notes

No. 1

1. Postmark: Helsinki. 2. The word metressa means mistress. Lunts suffered a stroke in August 1923 and for some months thereafter could not write properly: evidently he sent a letter to Zamyatin with misspellings. 3. “Rasskaz o samom glavnom” was published in Russkii sovremennik No. 1, 1924. An English translation is found in The Dragon: Fifteen Stories by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Random House: New York, 1966), trans, by Mirra Ginsburg. 4. The story is apparently “O Chude, proisshedshem v Pepel’nuiu Sredu," pub. in Novaia Rossiia No. 1, 1926. Trans, by Ginsburg as “The Miracle of Ash Wednesday.” 5. “0 literature, revoliutsii, èntropii i o prochem,” pub. in the collection Pisateli ob iskusstve i o sebe ("Krug": Moscow-Leningrad, 1924). 6. Voronsky was on the editorial board of the publishing house “Krug” (Circle). Others were A. Arosev, Nik. Aseev, Vs. Ivanov, Vas. Kazin, Nik. Nikitin, B. Pilniak and K. Fedin. 7. Zamyatin refers to We: the first English version appeared in 1924, the first full Russian text in 1952 (Chekhov Pub. House: New York). 8. Probably Lidiya Khariton, one of the “Serapionic maidens” who reported on the group's meetings to Lunts. She was perhaps Lunts’s girlfriend. 9. Literary jokes. Nikitin—probably a reference to his travel essays, ridiculed by Zamyatin in a review “Seichas na Zapade," Russkii sovremennik No. 2, 1924, 287-8. Zoshchenko was working for a satirical journal Drezina (Trolley). Fedin wrote the prize-winning story “The Orchard." 10. Zamyatin's review of the Serapion Brother almanac (1922), expanded into the article “New Russian Prose” (1923). English version available in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago, 1970), trans, by Mirra Ginsburg. 11. V. Sventsitsky was a literary scholar. Zamyatin made fun in his article of the novel Golod (Hunger) by the proletarian writer Sergei Semenov (1893-1943). 12. Mishka and Rostislav are probably teddy bears or dolls. Rastopyrka (mentioned later) is one or another of them (the name means “legs flopped out"). Zamyatin thought Lunts looked like his teddy bear (see the review of the Serapion Brothers).

Four Letters to Lev Lunts (1923-24)

271

13. Lyudmila Nikolaevna Zamyatina. Nothing was ever heard of a film version of "Outside the Law."

No. 2

1. Lunts sent parodies of the Serapion Brothers for the annual Feb. 1st celebration (the "birthday” of the group). The work, Khozhdeniia (Pilgrimage), was published in Novy/ zhurnal No. 83, 1966. 2. Lunts predicted various humorous fates for the Serapions: Nikitin became an "Alphonse” (Russian word for a kept man). As it happened, the Serapions had just had a big squabble over a newspaper notice on the death of Lenin; they believed Nikitin had tricked them into pronouncing their dedication to Lenin alongside the proletarian writers. Hence their joy at Nikitin's fate in Lunts’s parody. Zamyatin's note is only one of the twenty on the group letter to Lunts.

No. 3 1. Alexander Tikhonov, not the Serapion Nikolai. 2. These men were indeed the editors. The journal Russkii Sovremennik (The Rus­ sian Contemporary) is considered the last fully private literary journal in Russia. Four issues came out in 1924 in Moscow and Leningrad. 3. The idea seems to be that a fictional person will be listed (Prutkov is the fictional author of humorous poems by A.K. Tolstoi and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers). 4. Lunts sometimes had swollen limbs.

No. 4 1. Dated by the envelope. The letter may have arrived after Lunts's death. 2. In the article, "Desiat' strannikov v osiazaemoe nichto,” Iakov Braun compared the Serapion Brothers to a troupe of actors. 3. The play displeased Voronsky and other influential people. It was announced for the Aleksandrinsky Theater in Petrograd, but suddenly removed from the repertoire. 4. The play Blokha (The Flea), based on Leskov’s story "Levsha,” was performed by the 2nd Studio in 1925 and was a big success. The other play, Obshchestvo pochetnykh zvonarei (Society of Honorable Bellringers), based on Zamyatin’s own Ostrovitiane, was performed in the same year by the Mikhailovsky Theater. 5. "Journey on a Hospital Bed” is Lunts’s last work. It, the two dramas and other works will appear in English in Lev Lunts, Things in Revolt (Ardis). 6. The particular Misha is not known: probably Mikhail Zoshchenko, but possibly Mikhail Slonimsky.

A LETTER FROM EHRENBURG TO ZAMYATIN

12/1 [26] 64, av. du Maine, Paris 14e

Dear Evgeny Ivanovich:

I have received the manuscript of We from Vienna. I want to arrange a translation in “Nouv. Revue Franc.” or with S. Kra. But I need the English translation for this (the publishers don't know Russian, but everyone here reads English). Write them to send it to me right away. I read We. In my view the idea is magnificent. It’s an outrage that the book was not published after its writing. I think that now you would write much of it differently, leaving out some of the topical passages (The Grand Inquisitor and the like). The episode about the "soul" is forceful and convincing. In general the tonality of this book is very close to me now (romanticism, the protest against mechanization and the rest). Only the rhythm surprised me. Its chaoticness and mobility come more from the Russia of 1920 than from the glass city. Did you receive [one word illegible, ed.J The Grabbier? I am still waiting for your judgment. My new novel (The Summer of 1925) is finished and dispatched. Perhaps it will share the same fate as The Grabber! I’m preparing to come to Russia in March or April for a half-year. Write me.

Cordially yours, Ilya Ehrenburg

272

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED LETTERS TO HIS WIFE Evgeny Zamyatin

American scholars such as Alex Shane, Edward J. Brown, and Christopher Collins have testified that Zamyatin’s widow, Lyudmila Nikolaevna, was remarkably reticent about his and her biography. Apparently none of his letters to her has ever been published before, and it has generally been assumed that Zamyatin’s efforts to leave the USSR all related to the summer of 1931 when he wrote his well-known letter to Stalin. The following letters show that, like Bulgakov, with whom he was on very good terms, and with whom he consulted on the matter of such letters, Zamyatin wrote a letter of petition to go abroad as early as 1929. 7 VI 1928

. . . Yesterday afternoon was (had supper) at Bulgakov’s place. (He returned from the Caucasus earlier [indeciph.] due to the prohibi­ tion of his play).1 By 7 1/2 rode to the Union: the federation had arranged a meeting there with Gorky. Stuffiness, tedium [?], pails of slop speeches (Gladkov, Bakhmetiev, Libedinsky, Koltsov and the rest;2 no one spoke for the Union), boredom.

Thursday. 29-VIII-1929 (Koktebel)1

. . . today during dinner (I dine here all the time, at the Voloshin dacha) Veresaev2 dashed up, strayed into the flower bed (to Voloshin’s horror) and stuck in my hand the No. of Komsomol'skaia pravda from 27/VIII. A few minutes later Adrianov ran up with the edition of Lit. Gaz. from the 26th and Vech. [indeciph.] also from the 26th. General panic: everywhere—articles directed at Pilnyak and me: why was Pilnyak’s novel Mahogany, proscribed by our censorship, printed in Petropolis, and why was the novel We printed in Volia Rossii?3 All this is connected

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with the campaign against the Union of Writers begun in Lit. Gaz.—no small matter. I'll go after tea, at about 6, and talk it over with Veresaev; this time I may have to answer in the paper . . . 28-IX-1929 (Moscow)

. . . Well, then—yesterday, finally, I was at Gorky’s. I stayed at his place a long time—at first [indec.], then after dinner. He was very kind and considerate—I was also kind—by coincidence. Gorky gave me two documents: his letter to the editors of Lit. Gaz. and an application—with reasons—for a trip abroad. In about three days he will talk about this application with various Soviet personages. My “letter to the ed.”—now a new and more extensive one (written on Thursday)—concludes with my declaration of resigning the Union . . . The letter is already known to writers’ circles.1

24/X-1929 . . . Was at Gorky’s on Mon. and yesterday. Very considerate. Results are these: on Tuesday he spoke with Stalin—gave him a copy of my answer (to Al. Max.)1 And he spoke (a second time) with Yagoda.2 At long last the latter [?] said: “Well, if he will insist—we’ll just let him go, but we won't let him back . . . ”3 This matter (as G. said) must be begun in the normal way. Yesterday: . . . evening at Mikh. Af.4 He has some kind of heart seizures, took some valerian, lay in bed . . . “Letter to the ed."—it seems I won't print it. Wednesday, 29-1-1930 (Moscow)

. . . I've seen all kinds of people. Among whom I caught Polonsky and spoke with him about An. A.1 Things aren't good with her: now they’ve begun to remove the “non-active" from acad. security: they removed, for ex., Chulkov2 and A.A.—also I learned about this the day before yesterday, and yesterday I accosted Polonsky.3 He promised to speak about it with Khalatov4 and somebody else. Maybe I will learn the results as soon as today. Yesterday I had dinner and sat a while at Ek.P.5 Tomorrow or the next day she’ll see Yagoda and have a talk with him. . . . Tomorrow evening—probably, there will be a little soiree at Simonov’s,6 which I and Mikh. Af.7 will attend (but maybe it will be on Saturday).

Excerpts from Unpublished Letters to his Wife (1929-30)

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Better not to talk with Anna Andr. about her affairs: maybe things will get straightened out . . .

Trans, by G.K.

Notes Letter of June 7, 1928 1. At this time all of Bulgakov's plays (Days of the Turbins, Zoya's Apartment, Flight, The Crimson Island) were having problems, so it is difficult to say which one is meant here—though it is probably Days of the Turbins. 2. Fyodor Gladkov, author of Cement; Vladimir Bakhmetiev (1885-?); Mikhail Koltsov (1898-1942); Yury Libedinsky (1898-1959).

Letter of August 19, 1929 1. Poet Voloshin's home in Koktebel was the resting place for many writers, including Bulgakov (and his wife Lyubov Evgenievna). 2. V.V. Veresaev, well known author of A Doctor's Notes, Pushkin scholar, Bulgakov's friend and collaborator (at first) on Last Days. 3. Zamyatin and Pilnyak were, respectively, the chairmen of the Leningrad and Moscow sections of the Union of Writers at this time. The Russian Association of Proleta­ rian Writers (RAPP) launched, with this article, a full scale attack on the Union's leaders for their political, or apolitical, stances, and the fact that they had both published works abroad which could not be published in the USSR. As Zamyatin noted in his letter of reply, they were attacking him for events which were at least two years old—and for a publica­ tion which he had attempted to stop.

Letter of September 28, 1929 1. The letter to the editor was dated September 24, 1929 and was published in Literatumaia gazeta, No. 25 (October 7, 1929). A translation is published in Mirra Gins­ burg (ed. and trans.), A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago, 1970), 301-304.

Letter of October 24, 1929

1. Alexei Maximovich (Peshkov) = Gorky. 2. Yagoda (1891-1938), future head of the NKVD. 3. Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in November 1931. According to one source, the only important writer who dared to see him off was Anna Akhmatova. 4. Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov.

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Letter of January 29, 1930

1. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. 2. Georgy Chulkov, a poet, translator and critic. 3. Vyacheslav Polonsky (Gusin), 1886-1932, Party critic, editor and censor. 4. A.V. Khalatov was the head of the State Publishing House. 5. Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova (1876-1965), Gorky’s wife, from whom he was separated. She often interceded for writers. 6. Ruben Nikolaevich Simonov (1899-), an actor and director. 7. Bulgakov. Intro, and notes by Ellendea Proffer

THE MODERN RUSSIAN THEATER Evgeny Zamyatin

This work was first read as a lecture (in Russian) in Prague on December 20, 1931, a month after Zamyatin left Russia. At that time it was reviewed in Prague and in Russia and stirred up considerable controversy. Written up as an essay, the work was published in German, French and Serbo-Croatian translations in 1932 (see Alex Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, 82-89). The Russian text has not been located. The present text is based on a typed English manuscript with numerous revisions in Zamyatin's own hand. The English of this manu­ script is fluent, but riddled with problems—Russian word order, Ger­ manic transliterations, British spellings, and errors in grammar. In pre­ paring the manuscript for publication, therefore, I was faced with this choice: either reproduce the author's text and satisfy the archivist, or make the obvious corrections and interest the general reader of Rus­ sian literature. I took the second approach, reasoning that the archivist could go to the archive to learn about Zamyatin’s English. For the general reader, then, this is a “reading version’’ of the manuscript. All the changes I made were minor (mostly word order and verb tense), and in no case was the meaning altered. I have also added some notes. I wish to thank Alex Shane, who provided bibliographic information; Nina Berberova, who directed my attention to the manuscript; and the Princeton University Library, which granted per­ mission to use the manuscript. G.K.

Moscow ... A strange city, entirely unlike any European capital. America growing through the ancient walls of the Kremlin, the geomet­ rical Lenin mausoleum next to the multi-colored Asiatic Saint Basil, a moth-eaten droshky next to the newest Hispano-Suisa, both stopping at

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the command of a policeman’s white stick, the policeman wearing Euro­ pean white gloves and having an obviously Mongolian face with high cheekbones and narrow eyes; large shop windows displaying caviar and sturgeon and on the opposite side of the street a long queue of people waiting to buy herring or grain . . . But on entering the Hotel Metropole on Theater Square, all this is left behind and one finds oneself in a comfortable and respectable European atmosphere: this is a hotel for foreigners only, this is "abroad,” the "chervonets” is not accepted here, one must pay with foreign currency. One summer evening in 1931, as I was dining there with the well-known American film producer Cecil B. De Mille, our talk drifted to these astonishing Moscow contrasts—and then, of course, to the theater. “Your theater,” said De Mille, "is now, of course, the most interest­ ing one in Europe and America. Your actors and producers are the best in the whole world, but . . . ” Let this “but” remain for the time being in the wings of our article. I mention this remark of an American producer about the Russian theater in order not to be in the uncomfortable position of a man who praises what is his own. Yet I believe I could just as easily have cited any of the readers of this article, for who in the most cultured circles in Europe has not seen the Russian theater, or at least has not read enthusiastic reviews about it? Who does not know the names of Stanislavsky, Diaghilev, Meyerhold, Anna Pavlova, Chaliapin, Mikhail Chekhov, Kachalov? And if someone decided to arrange the Olympics of the World Theater, the majority would certainly vote for the Russian theater. History, I think, has already counted these votes, and in today’s world competition the Russian theater emerges the winner. There is a saying: “The winner is not judged.” But this saying, like so many others, should have been turned the other way round a long time ago. It ought to be said: “Only the winner should be judged.” The winner can hear the truth—and can bear to hear it, which is not so easy. The theater—I mean the genuine one—is definitely the result of COL­ LECTIVE work, a creative melting of three fundamental elements: the playwright, the producer and the actor. The most fundamental difference between the Russian and the modern European theater, and the secret of the Russian theater’s success, lies in the fact that its foremost leaders understood (I would rather say, felt) this collective principle and carried it out in practice. Their collective buildings are of very different, very dissimilar styles. But

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the important thing is that each of the foremost Russian theaters has a clearly expressed countenance, has its own focus, where all the rays converge as in a burning glass and thus obtain the power to set fire to the spectators. In no Russian theater of any importance today can one see something that is happening in many theaters in Berlin and Paris, and is considered a most usual procedure there, namely the changing of the cast for each new play. At one time this was as impossible for the Meiningen Theater as it is now for the Stanislavsky, the Tairov, or the Meyerhold. The tendency of the European theater to rely on the talent and art of one or various individual actors is its chief weakness, while the tendency of the Russian theater to rely on a permanent ensemble of actors, who are united by a single school, is its greatest strength. After the Revolution in Russia, acting schools and studios sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Especially in Leningrad: there were the theatrical schools of the militia, the firemen, the sailors, the students, the clerks of different commissariats . . . But all these studios disappeared as quickly as the mushrooms. Only a few serious theatric­ al schools continued, such as the Institute of Scenic Art (ISI) in Leningrad, the same Institute in Moscow and Kharkov. But even these schools produce no more than the raw materials for the real actors’ schools, which some of the Russian theaters are now. The existence of such schools guarantees the long life of the theater, for it makes the theater independent of individual masters, it secures the succession of the actor’s art. In this respect, Stanislavsky’s school—the Moscow Art Theater (“the First MKhAT”)—is most typical. At one time it seemed that this theater owed its success to a happy chance, which united so many first-class actors in one group. But in the last few years the old masters have gradually left the scene, and not because their talent is on the wane, but because this talent no longer finds suitable material in the new plays of the revolutionary repertory. When, for instance, the splen­ did Kachalov, with his mild gestures, his velvety voice, appears on the stage playing the part of a muzhik, a “red partisan” (in Ivanov’s play The Armored Train), one is reminded of an Arabian steed harnessed to a cart loaded with timber. The Arabian steed, of course, can draw the cart, but it is not the most pleasant sight. Some of the Art Theater’s other old “stars” found themselves in the same position as Kachalov, so bye and bye they disappeared from the playbill skies, and it seemed as if the twilight of the theater were near. Nothing of the sort happened. The school, the collective spirit of the theater had done its work: new stars rose in the place of old ones.

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Among his young pupils Stanislavsky found actors of great talent quite worthy of taking the place of the old masters (young actors like Yanshchin, Khmelyov, Livanov). And besides this, the former studios of Stanislavsky’s theater had already grown strong roots by this time, and these studios quickly became independent first-rate theaters like the Second Moscow Art Theater (“the Second MKhAT”) and “Vakhtan­ gov's Theater.” The history of the Second Art Theater is an interesting example of what I have said above about the way the work of actors is organized in Russia. One of the founders of this young theater and later its manager was Mikhail Chekhov (the nephew of the famous writer).1 In Moscow during the last few years before he left Russia, he was indeed the god of the theatergoing public, and the public was not mistaken in its choice: Chekhov is in fact the greatest of contemporary Russian actors. In order to be a genius an actor must be, so to speak, a woman: he must be able to give himself completely to his part. This is what Chekhov did. On the stage he did not exist as a man who firmly, quite manlike, asserts himself. On the stage there was either Khlestakov in Gogol's The Inspector General, or Hamlet, or the comical Fraser in Berger’s The Flood,2 or the touching old Kaleb in The Cricket on the Hearth based on Dickens’ story,3 and every one of these characters was abso­ lutely unlike the other. But Mikhail Chekhov was not only the leading actor, he was the heart of the theater. And when he left Russia several years ago and stayed abroad to work, it seemed that the pulse of his theater would stop beating and that the theater would die of artistic anemia. But the wonderful regenerating capacity of a well-organized collective body helped in this case as well. Although not all at once. The Second Art Theater got over the loss, it did not perish, and it continues to occupy one of the leading positions in Moscow. An even more demonstrative case is that of two opera houses—the “Mariinsky” in Leningrad and "The Bolshoi Opera” in Moscow. These two theaters, which up to 1917 were “Imperial" ones, lost their theatrical Emperor Chaliapin, but they had the strength to maintain their former high artistic level. This applies to the ballet casts of these theaters as well. To sum up, I should say that in the modern Russian theater "the autocracy” of separate great actors has been replaced by the "republic of actors,” and in most cases the theaters have gained because of it. I shall mention only two exceptions: "The Maly Theater" in Moscow and the "Alexandrinsky” in Leningrad. These two well-known dramatic theaters, both formerly “Imperial” also, had very good casts which depended not so much on unity as on separate brilliant units, and

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because of this they have now lost their former significance and be­ come theaters of the eclectic type. Hr Hr *

The “republic of actors” certainly could not exist without a “president” who writes and directs them by a single artistic will, that is to say without a producer. There are many capable and talented producers now in Russia, but the mathematics of art are paradoxical: the sum of these many producers is equal to two: Stanislavsky plus Meyerhold. Indeed, the work of these two men determines the new era of the Russian Theater, and these two well-known names represent two opposite poles to which all the other producers’ lines converge. It now seems impossible, but as a matter of fact there was a time when these two opposite poles, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, met at one point. There was a time (before the war) when Meyerhold was an actor in Stanislavsky’s theater . . . Still, did not Luther spring from the Catholic Church in order to become its most irreconcilable enemy? Thus Meyerhold came out of Stanislavsky’s theater in order to become its artistic antagonist and to build his theatrical work on principles quite opposite to Stanislavsky’s. Meyerhold, the illegitimate son of Stanislavsky, is a legitimate grandson of Gozzi, his theater is undoubtedly a theater of masks, it is above all a game, a game with the spectators, based on the unmasking of theatric­ al illusion. A game allowing every kind of anachronism, eccentricity, dissonance, things which are quite inconceivable in Stanislavsky’s theater. As a rule, the spectator at one of Meyerhold’s productions must not for a single moment forget that he is watching actors, who are only “acting.” And as a rule in Stanislavsky’s theater the spectator must not for a moment think that he is watching a play and not a slice of real life. Meyerhold calls Stanislavsky’s work, without much respect, “looking through a keyhole into a stranger’s house.” Meyerhold’s work seems like circus work to Stanislavsky. And indeed the word "circus” (with the + sign, of course) can often be heard during Meyerhold’s lessons with his pupils. He builds his work on the exercise of the human body, on its development to the utmost limit—including acrobatics. Stanislavsky tries to obtain from his pupils the utmost development of their psycholo­ gical abilities, including a complete transformation into persons who live in the given play, and it is quite comprehensible that during his lessons (at least in former times) he used a terminology taken from yoga. In short, Meyerhold takes the “material” of the theater as a basis, and Stanislavsky takes the “spirit.”

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It would seem that in a country where materialism is something like a state religion, Meyerhold would be certain of a long-lasting and guaranteed success. But strange as it may seem, in recent years Meyerhold’s position has proved much more difficult than Stanislavsky's. This will seem more comprehensible if one considers Meyerhold’s biography as a producer. Well before the Revolution and Civil War he started his career as a theatrical rebel fighting against the dubious theater of Leonid Andreev. And 20-25 years later, in our days, he suddenly came face to face again with a dubious and sermonizing theater, although now with a different coloration. This meeting, in spite of the greatest good will and mutual sympathy, could not be amicable because of the deep, inrooted, organic differences between the two. A strong propagandistic pathos is incompatible with the pure Meyerholdian principle of the theater as a “game.” This meeting could be suc­ cessful in only one domain, that of high satire. But precisely in this domain there was a creative draught, no harvest in the repertory due to the frost of censorship. Meyerhold most often seeks refuge from all these contradictions in the fortresses of classical works, well protected from the political attacks of the over-Marxed critics. Meyerhold, with his sixty years, is still young, and he wants the classics to be as young on his stage. Therefore, without the slightest hesitation, he sews monkey glands into them. Without the slightest pity, he performs operations on them as cruel as those in H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. Luckily the patients of Doctor Meyerhold are much more obe­ dient and cannot rise against him, although some of them, perhaps, have quite a legitimate right. Of all the classics which Meyerhold has rejuvenated (he has pro­ duced the works of Ostrovsky, Gogol, Griboedov), perhaps only Gogol, whose genius is most closely related to Meyerhold, could thank him for the production of The Inspector General.4 Meyerhold managed to turn this play, which had always been treated as an amusing comedy, into an unusual, almost terrifying spectacle. And the remarkable thing is that this was attained without changing the original text, unless one counts the introduction of several musical numbers, and the new divisions made in the acts of the play. As might be expected, the most ardent followers of Meyerhold have turned out to be more Meyerholdian than Meyerhold himself, and they have been trying even more hazardous experiments with the classics. The Alexandrinsky Theater in Leningrad, for instance, not long ago produced a rejuvenated Tartuffe. The comedy takes place in super-modern surroundings: on board a transatlantic ship, in motor cars and even ... in the gondola of an airship. The actors, naturally, are

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dressed in modern clothes, and to his astonishment the spectator sees before him, among other characters, an orthodox priest, a mulla, a rabbi, the Pope, Pilsudsky and MacDonald . . . Luckily these characters are silent and appear only during the pantomime intermezzos. Another, no less dangerous experiment was tried out at the Vakhtangov Theater in July of this year, namely the re-interpretation of Hamlet. We are told that for all these centuries everyone was mistaken—Hamlet is by no means a tragic hero, disappointed in life, he is a gay, life-loving, skeptic­ al and cynical fellow rather remindful of Falstaff. Ophelia certainly could not have lost her reason over an unhappy love-affair, it is simply that she was returning home after some festive dinner and everything she says is not due to madness but under the influence of drink . . . These anecdotal facts are an illustration of Meyerhold’s influence on modern Russian producers: Meyerhold’s method has until now been the dominant one. Stanislavsky laid the foundation for several excellent new theaters, he also trained a number of brilliant young actors, but strange as it may seem, he did not give us one single producer worthy of himself. Vakhtangov, who died at the beginning of the Revolution, was perhaps the only exception (he was the originator of two most wonderful productions: Dybbuk5 in the Moscow Jewish Theater “Habima" and Turandot6 in the Moscow Vakhtangov Theater). And yet, in the last two or three years, while art in general has abandoned the extreme left positions, Stanislavsky has again come to the fore. The time is gone when the public, blinded by Futurism, Supre­ matism and Constructivism, accepted everything put before it. There are few snobs left today who have seen everything in their lifetime and seek something quite extraordinary, “épatant” on the stage. The new, less sophisticated spectator demands above all from the theater illu­ sions of real life, stronger and deeper impressions than even the most brilliant “acting.” This explains the recent turn of the Russian theater audiences towards Stanislavsky and theaters related to his, such as The Second MKhAT and Vakhtangov’s Theater. Last year this turn was confirmed, so to say, by official seal: Stanislavsky’s theater was taken under the special patronage of the Kremlin, the “red director” of this theater (a Communist appointed by the government) was recalled and Stanislavsky became again the sole and all-powerful director-manager of this theater. By the way, the Bolshoi Opera Theater in Moscow has received the same grace. This certainly does not mean that Meyerhold’s importance in the Russian Theater has come to an end. He has left too deep an imprint in the formal life of the theater for it to disappear. This cannot happen also because the closest followers of Stanislavsky, such as Vakhtangov’s

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Theater and The Second MKhAT, no longer employ Stanislavsky’s methods in their pure form, but with a mixture of Meyerholdism. If I, a heretic, were allowed to use Marx’s (or rather Hegel’s) terminology, I would call Stanislavsky’s work the “thesis” and Meyerhold’s the “antithesis,” and I believe that the near future belongs to the synthesis of both these influences and that this synthetic line will be the basis of Russian productions.

And now the producer of this article returns to its first scene: Moscow, Theater Square, Hotel Metropole. And the unfinished reply of Cecil B. De Mille: “Your actors and producers are the best in the whole world, but. . . where are your new plays worthy of them? In America we follow you with the greatest interest, we want to learn about your new life built along quite different lines and—to draw our own conclusions, but in­ stead we are given ready-made conclusions, a sermon. This isn’t of much interest to us, and I doubt if it’s of any interest to you." The American producer had a right to be doubtful on this score, for indeed, the repertory is now the weakest spot in the Russian theater. It seems that something quite inconceivable has taken place: it was much easier to move the tremendous weight of economics and industry than a seemingly light and ethereal substance—such as dramatics. But this seems inconceivable only at first glance, the whole matter lies in the simple laws of mechanics: the heavier and more solid a mass is, the greater the effect of a blow. It is easy to imagine the result of a blow on a gas cloud! In Russia they have tried in recent years to conquer this law of mechanics and to force the gaslike cloud of dramatics to advance with the same speed as the rolling iron ball of industry. Of course, the effect has not been very cheerful for dramatics: the cloud has been dis-concentrated, dispersed, and the result has been a number of wat­ ery plays à thèse, whose life was not of long duration. What new Rus­ sian plays, in fact, were successful and kept long on the posters? In Stanislavsky’s theater, Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armored Train has been shown for several seasons. This is a play based on the Civil War, its dramatic technique is not the best, still the producer managed to turn it into a good show.7 In the same theater, Bulgakov’s play The Last Days of The Turbins (based on the Civil War in the Ukraine) was shown very successfully and later forbidden by the censor.8 And finally Kataev's play The Squaring of the Circle, a very well-written farce on the life of

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Soviet students.9 In the Second Art Theater, The Flea, a play by the author of this article, is being shown for the sixth season. This play is an attempt to renew the Russian folk comedy.10 This theater has also produced Afinogenov’s play The Strange Man, a fortunate Soviet varia­ tion of Chekhov’s plays.11 The "mascotte” of the Vakhtangov Theater was Lavrenyov’s psychological drama, again based on the rich theme of the Civil War: Falling Apart.12 Two more plays should be mentioned: Trenyov’s Lyubov Yarovaya13 and Kirshon’s The Railway Lines Are Humming.14 Both these plays held the public’s attention for a long time, but both did so mostly because of the novelty of the subject: Lyubov Yarovaya was the first play about the Civil War, and Kirshon’s play was the first one to deal with a factory and factory life. And finally Erdman’s The Mandate, which had a record run in Meyerhold’s theater. This play was one of the few examples of a new high satire, for the development of which, as has been said above, the literary climate in Russia is not very favorable at present (The Mandate was shown 6-7 years ago).15 I have mentioned so far only the Moscow theaters, because these theaters are the real test for plays. Plays that have passed this test afterwards make a tour of all the important provincial theaters. Such was the case with all the above-mentioned plays. But it may be observed that among these plays there was only one that treated of current problems such as industrialization, the kolkhozes, etc. When Russian playwrights, spurred on by the official critics, hurriedly took these as yet unformed, everchanging matters, the result was something which can only be called a dramatic abortion: quite a number of hastily written, raw plays appeared. Like all abortions, they had dispro­ portionately large heads, filled with the best ideology, and thin weak bodies, too weak to bear the weight of this ideology. Like all abortions, they needed to be artificially fed, the critics nourished them as much as possible, and still they perished very quickly. The failure of these plays did not lie in the mediocrity of their authors. Some playwrights who had shown their talent in other plays tried these themes, but the results were no better. For instance, the author of The Squaring of the Circle, Kataev, came forward with a play called The Avant-Garde, which was saved but for a short period by the excellent production of the Vakhtan­ gov Theater. (Translated into German, it lasted for only 4-5 perform­ ances in Berlin.) The author of the very successful Lyubov Yarovaya wrote a weak kolkhoz play Yasnyi Log (produced at the Maly Theater in Moscow, 1931). The rather talented writer Nikolai Nikitin gave a very weak play The Line of Fire, concerning which the Soviet critics had to admit that in spite of the excellence of the ideology, the play was, from the point of view of art, a failure (Tairov’s Theater, Moscow).16 And so

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on. Of all these hasty and false works only Afinogenov’s play Fear ought to be put aside. It had a great success, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. This play has for its theme the same everlasting “complot” of the “vrediteli"—the “harmers,” but there is also the everlasting ethic­ al question of the rights of the Revolution to make use of terror. This is what guaranteed the play a long run.17 This tendency toward pure publicists, "industrial” themes spread from the dramatic theater to the opera and ballet. During the 1930-31 season, the Mariinsky Theater produced the ballet The Bolt. On the stage, of course, we were shown a factory, there was a dance of the workmen at the furnaces, a dance of the “vrediteli," a dance of the “kulaks,” and a sort of dance "apotheosis”—dances of different parts of the Red Army, including Red Cavalrymen who galloped wildly . . . while sitting on chairs. The result was by no means an apotheosis, the first night of the ballet happened to be its last. The opera Ice and Steel, shown at the same theater, met with the same fate. At the same time the Moscow Bolshoi Opera Theater was showing an “industrial” opera The Prophet which would have been more aptly named “The Failure.” If I am not mistaken, it was also taken off after the first performance. Stalin, who had assisted in the first production, gave an unfavorable opinion and the fate of this opera was sealed. Perhaps not only this particular opera was doomed. The govern­ ment finally took notice of the epidemic and took measures to amelio­ rate the theatrical repertory. It was at this moment that the Bolshoi Opera Theater and Stanislavsky’s Theater received their new constitution. The critics were given new orders to start a campaign against “red khaltura”—against “red nonsense” in dramatic literature.18 Several plays were removed from the list of librorum prohibitorum, these plays had little in common with the questions of the day but had much in common with genuine art. Because of an order from above, the ban on Bulgakov’s play The Last Days of the Turbins was lifted. The formerly prohibited play by the same author, Molière,''9 and Erdman’s The Suicide20 were also allowed. The season of 1930-1931 was a season which revived classical plays on the stage, especially in the opera and ballet. The campaign against “red nonsense" is apparently a serious one, and will, let us hope, result in better conditions for the work of playwrights. The very talented young playwright Olesha has summed up the situation very well in one short phrase: “The writer must have time to think.”

***

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Until now I have mentioned only the professional, acknowledged theater, which presently only continues the work started long before the Revolution. But there are several theatrical forms which had no pre-revolutionary ancestors. They are the more interesting because, as far as I know, they have no equivalent in the European theater. The inculcation of politics into everyday life and everybody’s life in Russia gave birth to the “Living Newspaper.” As the name itself shows, this is a theatrical "feuilleton,” based partly on general political events and partly on more particular themes taken from the lives of different factories. This form of theater sprung from the workmen’s amateur theater clubs at the beginning of the Revolution. The "Living Newspaper” is even now very often run by amateurs, but professional young actors are more and more joining them, they form small “living newspaper” casts. While having a permanent cast, these theaters do not have a permanent stage, and usually they make the rounds of the different factory club theaters. This branch of the theater is, of course, only a utilitarian, publicistic form. But then the “Living Newspaper” makes no pretensions to anything greater. The material for these “newspapers” is supplied to their own authors, whose names remain unknown. Until now no well-known author has tried to express himself in this theatrical form. The so-called “TRAMs” (Theaters of the Working Youth) also sprang from the amateur workmen’s clubs at the beginning of the Revolution.21 Little by little they are turning into theaters of the profes­ sional type, all the while keeping their own plays and their own traditions. The casts of these theaters consist almost exclusively of young workmen who first discovered their histrionic talents on their own homemade stages. And if somewhere the "industrial” plays do not seem to sound a false note, it is in these “TRAM” theaters. For these actors grew up in industry, they know it thoroughly and its interests are of true value to them. It is interesting to note that the plays of these “TRAMs” remain within their own walls, none of them ever appear on the greater professional stages. Contrary to the professional theater, which is undoubtedly superior in Moscow to that of Leningrad, the “TRAMs” of the former capital are of a much greater artistic value than those of Moscow. And now let us leave the four walls of the Theater and come outside—to the theater under the open sky, the "theater of the square.” Officially there is no such term as yet, perhaps it has never even appeared before this article, which is not extraordinary as there is really no such theater, there is only its embryo. What I mean by this "theater of the square” is the few experiments of mass spectacles made during

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the so-called “revolution festivals.” And here again Leningrad has the better of Moscow. From the Moscow experiments of this sort, only one may perhaps be made use of someday, namely the tremendous and almost wild idea of a young musician who tried to regale the city with a symphony . . . played on the factory whistles. The “orchestra” had to give its concert after only one rehearsal; the experiment was not suc­ cessful and has been forgotten for the time being. But many of the Petersburg theatrical audiences still remember the spectacle, whose stage was the enormous porches and staircase of the Petersburg Exchange. The play was some hastily written agitational piece, but the play mattered little, what mattered were the scale and size of the theater. Instead of the gong at the beginning of the performance—a six-inch gun, instead of the footlights—searchlights, instead of scenery—tremendous white columns, with the silky blackness of the sky as a background. The crowds of many thousands on the shore of the Neva—formed the audience of the stalls, and those on the ships at the shore—the audience in the boxes. This was indeed a great theatric­ al spectacle, it was not a pity to have spent several hundred million to produce it (the most humble unit in those times was a million). Later on one had to learn to count in tens and hundreds, great expenses for such spectacles became impossible and the few experiments of this sort had to be done on a much smaller scale, and hence the result was not successful. But perhaps these failures are only the beginning of a new road, a road which may lead us back to the long forgotten Greek .

' 22 oryopa.

Notes 1. Mikhail Chekhov, together with Boris Sushkevich, assumed leadership of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theater in 1922, after the death of Evgeny Vakhtangov. In 1924 the First Studio was renamed the Second MKhAT. Chekhov emigrated in 1928. 2. The Flood (Russian title Potop) by Henning Berger was presented in the First Studio in December, 1916, directed by Vakhtangov. 3. The Cricket on the Hearth (Russian title: Sverchok na pechi), adapted by Sush­ kevich and directed by Leopold Sulerzhitsky, was the hit of the First Studio’s 1914 season. 4. Revizor premiered on December 9, 1926, in the Meyerhold Theater. 5. Dybbuk by S. An-sky (pseudonym of Solomon Rappoport) was first produced in 1922. It has been played throughout the world with Vakhtangov’s staging. 6. Princess Turandot by Carlo Gozzi was staged three months before Vakhtangov’s death in 1922. 7. Bronepoezd 14-69 by Vsevolod Ivanov, a dramatization of the story of the same name, was first produced in 1927. See RLT No. 2, 1972 for a translation of the story.

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8. Dni Turbinykh by Mikhail Bulgakov adapted from his novel The White Guard (Belaya gvardiya), premiered on Oct. 5, 1926. It was banned at various times and finally revived in 1932. 9. Kvadratura kruga by Valentin Kataev was first shown in 1925-1926. 10. Blokha, based on Nikolai Leskov's story Levsha, was directed by Alexei Diky. It premiered on Feb. 11, 1925. 11. Chudak by Alexander Afinogenov was produced by the Second MKhAT in 1929 and the State Dramatic Theater in 1930. 12. Razlom, usually translated as "The Break," by Boris Lavrenyov, was first pro­ duced by the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater in 1927. 13. Lyubov Yarovaya by Konstantin Trenyov premiered in the Maly Theater on Dec. 22, 1926. It ran for 200 performances there, and then was taken up by the Moscow Art Theater. 14. Relsy gudyat by Vladimir Kirshon was given in the Theater MGSPS and the Leningrad Academic Theater of Drama in 1928. 15. Nikolai Erdman's Mandat, which ran over 100 performances, premiered at the Meyerhold Theater on April 20, 1925. It caused a political scandal. See the article on Erdman in RLT No. 2, 1972. 16. Nikitin’s Liniya ognya was performed in Tairov's Kamernyi Theater and the Leningrad Bolshoi Dramatic Theater in 1931. 17. Strakh was first produced by the Moscow Art Theater in 1929. The word vrediteli is usually translated into English as "the wreckers"—meaning all those saboteurs, schemers and malingerers who endanger the Revolution. 18. The word khaltura might better be rendered by the words “potboiling, claptrap, bilge." 19. Permission for the production of Molière was granted in 1932, but the play was not staged until Feb. 15,1936, at the Moscow Art Theater. It was blasted in the press and closed after seven performances. 20. Both the Moscow Art Theater and the Meyerhold Theater tried to get permission for the play The Suicide (Samoubiitsa). After a private showing of excerpts in the latter theater in 1932, however, permission was refused. The play has never appeared in Russia. Versions have been published in Russian (Novyi zhurnal No. 112 & 113, 1973) and in English (RLT, No. 7, 1973). 21. TRAM = feafr rabochei molodyozhi ("Theater of the Working Youth”). 22. Agora—the square or marketplace in an ancient Greek city.

THE FUTURE OF THE THEATER Evgeny Zamyatin

This essay was written shortly after Zamyatin left the Soviet Union (November 1931). A French translation appeared in the Parisian jour­ nal Les Moins (May 1932); the Russian text was first published in America (1973). Zamyatin’s autograph copy is kept in the Princeton University Library. I wish to thank Nina Berberova, who directed my attention to the essay, and Alex Shane, who provided bibliographic information.

G.K.

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past. This is done very simply. Suddenly you recall: “Was I not right? Did I not say five years ago that ...” Chère confrère, you did say that, but you also said many other things which definitely did not come about, and it is your good fortune that the reader is distracted and forgetful, otherwise you could never have entered the professional union of prophets. I am not a member of this union and therefore consider myself entitled to take risks and make errors. Besides, an error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis. And so, the problem of the theater’s future. And the most radical solution to this problem: might there soon be no theater at all? Is it not strange to speak of the theater at a time when people politely deliberate how they will or will not kill each other tomorrow? Is it not absurd for people to concern themselves with the theater (and how!) in a country bearing the telegraphic code name of U.S.S.R., where there are not enough pants and bread? Is it not unconscientious to think of the thea­ ter in countries where thousands of unemployed live on handouts from the state or its less unconscientious citizens? No, it is not strange, absurd or unconscientious. Once, at a time far removed from ours (and yet very close), the time of "crises” in Rome, the hungry crowd cried out in the streets: “Panem et circenses!" Bread and the theater were placed side by side as two indispensable items—and so they will remain forever. Le théâtre—ni passe, ni lasse, 290

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because it satisfies man’s organic need for a play, a need as organic as hunger. A pilot who no longer fears the air begins to play with it, to fly loop the loops. A writer who no longer fears the word begins to play with it, just as the pilot with the plane. Play is the natural expression of man’s conquest of something, just as a cry is the natural expression of pain. The most serious play is playing with fate, which conceals in its pocket the long imprinted schedule naming the day and the hour of the tragic end of us all. The peaceful, lazy time which gave birth to the theory that tragedy is for heroes only has long since passed. The princi­ ple of mechanical mass production is in effect everywhere, and fate, which once labored endlessly with its primitive implements to manufac­ ture only one Oedipus, now with the aid of gases produces Oedipuses by the set, the series, the shelf. How many Lears, betrayed and forgot­ ten by all, have revolutions sent out into the world? And are not the payment dates moving up on Ivar Kreuger1 more terrifying than the Birnam wood of Macbeth? Tragedy, it would seem, is the most legitimate theatrical form for our time. And yet there is still no new tragedy—not even in Russia, where they are convinced that the Birnam wood is as good a material for construction as any other wood. The trouble is that with the use of the machine one can very easily manufacture as many Oedipuses, as much raw material for tragedy, as he likes, but for the manufacture of rare, complex apparati, capable of processing this material and its would-be Shakespeares, the machine civilization does not suffice. Evidently many are already beginning to suspect that it is time to bridle the raging herds of machines. We have not long to wait for this, and so we have not long to wait for our Shakespeares. But in the meantime we have “wartime bread” instead of real bread: we have melodrama instead of tragedy. It was not by accident that I referred above to Russia. This is a country stubbornly trying to leap into the future over a barrier of some fifty years. When deciding the problem of the future in any field, one should take a look into that laboratory—even an opponent of vivisection. It is very curious that in Russia the intimate love drama has practi­ cally disappeared from the stage. This theatrical genre, often arranged with great talent and taste, represents a peek through the keyhole into someone else’s apartment; it is one of the legitimate forms of shamelessness. This should by no means be understood as a reproach: shamelessness is also an organic need of man, and in other areas forms have been found for it which enjoy universal respect, such as marriage. In the Russian laboratory this problem is resolved in a way

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that provides almost no material for collisions or, consequently, theat­ rical play. Obstacles are needed for play, and here there are none as yet. But, of course, this is only "as yet.” I do not know how many decades it will take, but someday the first pages of all the newspapers will be filled with reports on the international Geneva conference on problems of state anthropoculture: just as now one argues about the calibre of instruments, so in the future one will argue about the calibre of mothers and fathers permitted to produce children in the world. Having organized the material basis of life, the state must inevitably concern itself with problems of eugenics, the perfection of the human race, and this will provide the richest material for the new love drama. This drama will not be played out within the little triangle of adultery: it will be founded on the collision of the individual with the state, which crushes the human ants in its path as sternly and mercilessly as fate. And this will raise the love drama to a higher plane: tragedy.

I do not want to be a prophet of doom, but it seems to me that the one human absolute—the precious metal, the gold which fears neither rust nor time—is human stupidity. The golden sparks of stupidity will shine forth in people after all revolutions, and so, no matter how the theater may change, there will always be a place for the farce, for vaudeville. This is the simplest kind of comedy—fools playing wise men. It is founded on the same basic principle of play as an expression of conquest: the spectator, somewhat unhappily situated in regard to stupidity, laughs at a farcical fool and unfailingly feels superior to him; he goes to bed peacefully, a conqueror. .. The high genre of comedy, the satire, apparently must vanish. Strangely enough, it is precisely in connection with such a merry sub­ ject as comedy that one is obliged to recall something serious—politics. Whether we approve it or not, whether we want it or not, the world is clearly moving from democracy toward dictatorship, be it to the left or to the right. For the theater the consequences are the same: the degen­ eration of satire. High satire is the magnificent spectacle of little David attacking Goliath. Only in this combination does satire give the specta­ tor a real comedic catharsis. But the effect of the Biblical experiment helps the Goliaths of our time to come to the right conclusion: Davidian jokes are dangerous in wartime. The materials of the Russian laboratory best known to me only confirm this theoretical conclusion. In the Russian theater today there

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are no examples of a new, large-scale satire; large satiric presentations there are created only out of classical material taken from the museum, like Molière’s comedies or Gogol’s The Inspector General. Perhaps new Gogols do exist, but their tongues are kept on a leash. To the spectator who has lived through a social revolution, the contemporary European type of satire fails to provide the necessary material. When Bernard Shaw overturns the parliamentary apple cart with a groan (The Apple Cart), what emotions can this arouse in, say, a Russian spectator? At best—pity for a groaning old man. His ancient profession—shocking the bourgeoisie—proves unnecessary under the new conditions, and as for shocking the proletariat—he lacks courage.2 * * *

Opera and ballet: here, it would seem, the fruits of the Russian laboratory are so generally recognized and indisputable that anyone setting out into the future may pack them without risk into his theatrical suitcase. Alas, “it would seem.” On closer examination these fruits prove too ripe to withstand the long haul; one must hasten to eat them right away. And apparently they sense this instinctively in Russia. The public hurries to buy up the tickets to operas and ballets; the opera houses are full. .. when the classics are playing—Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky. The attempt to construct an opera or ballet out of new material is doomed to failure from the start. One can undertake the construction of tractors or the obtainment of chemical fertilizer with the greatest enthusiasm, but even if Chaliapin began to sing an aria about fertilizer it would inevitably produce a comic effect instead of enthusiasm. The completely artificial, conventional genres of the lyrical opera and the ballet are seeing their last days in their old form: the nitric acid of irony, spreading through the blood of the contemporary spectator, is eating them up. But then technology long ago learned to use the des­ tructive force of nitric acid for positive purposes—and the more pers­ picacious composers attempt to use this same method of saving the opera and ballet: they take irony as the motivating force and thereby disarm the spectator (Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges, the oper­ as of Krenek).3 But this will not save the lyrical pathos of the bygone opera. It is dissolving before our very eyes into the components of music and words (music and dance in the ballet), united on the stage in an artificial, mechanical manner. These components will enter the theater

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of the future in their pure form; they will give it a firm, indissoluble union in a synthetic presentation, the creation of which is being considered by the best theatrical minds of today. The first attempts in this direction—undoubtedly successful—have already been made, as most dramatic presentations in the new Russian theater are accompanied by music. Action and speech in this instance are not hindered by the music (as in an opera): it forms only a necessary background, it creates a musical decoration for the performance. And precisely this decoration belongs to the future.

This essay would not be complete if I said nothing about the cruelest foe of the theater—the movie, which many see as the theater of the future. And it would seem that they are right. Today the spectator votes for the movie by dropping his francs and shillings into the box. Franc-shilling arguments are too strong not to win. After all, what sense does it make to the spectator to go and see Don Quixote with Chaliapin at the theater, when he can see and hear almost the same thing at the movies for half as much? Fortunately, the decisive moment in art—the theater included—lies precisely in this "almost." Fortunately, monetary arguments have force only for our crepuscular era of crises, but not for the future, when the development of art will be determined by different motives. The movie is also only "wartime bread.” As soon as real bread becomes available for all, the ersatz theater of the movie will find its true place, the area where it can really be useful: pedagogics—next to the textbook and blackboard.

Notes

1. Ivar Kreuger—the famous Swedish financier who once controlled most of the world's match market. In 1931 it became known that he had gone bankrupt, and a year later he committed suicide. 2. If Shaw had stayed in Russia not nine days, but a long time, he would not have had occasion to be delighted by the total absence of unemployment there: Mister Shaw soon would have found himself unemployed. (Crossed out in Zamyatin's Russian text. G.K.) 3. Ernst Krenek—an Austrian composer famous at the time for his jazz opera Jonny spielt auf.

EVGENY ZAMYATIN’S AUTO-INTERVIEW

In November of 1931 Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin and his wife Lyudmila Nikolaevna left the Soviet Union for a year's stay abroad with the idea of traveling to the United States, where Zamyatin had hoped to stage several of his plays and to screen several of his works with Cecil B. DeMille. Although the trip to America never did materialize, Zamyatin spent several months in Riga, Berlin, and Prague before settling in France, where he chose to live in self-imposed exile until his death in 1937. On March 4, 1932, shortly after his arrival in Paris, Zamyatin, along with Henri Barbusse, Ilya Ehrenburg and Ovady Savich, was a guest of honor at a dinner given by the Groupe des Ecrivains Prolétariens de Paris. During the next two months he sought to establish contacts with the various French literary and theatrical circles in order to arrange for the translation of his fiction, the staging of plays, and the publication of essays on the contemporary scene in the Soviet Union. Late in April he was interviewed by the critic Frédéric Lefèvre, who published an extensive three-column article embellished with two photographs in the prestigious Les Nouvelles littéraires. The interview contained an interesting mixture of biography and critical commentary on Zamyatin's own works in particular as well as on the Soviet literary scene in general. The question-and-answer format, especially Lefèvre's substitution of a dash, ellipsis, and question mark (— . . . ?) for actual questions, undoubtedly inspired Zamyatin’s “Auto-Interview" in which he presents a concise thematic analysis of Russian literature under the first five-year plan. The essay was prob­ ably written during the last week of April or in early May while Zamyatin was visiting the Russian artist Boris Grigoriev on the Riviera. Apparent­ ly it was not published in French translation. I am indebted to Mme T.A. Jaba-Velitchkovsky and to the Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University for granting permission to publish the text in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 2 (1972).

Alex M. Shane

★★* 295

New Zamyatin Materials

296 “

Q’’1

“Well, about myself. I already told enough to Mr. Frédéric Lefèvre recently for his series ‘Une heure avec . . . ' in Nouvelles Littéraires.2 So now my children can speak for me ... ” il

Q”

“Yes, they’re with me here in France, more accurately—in the French language. My children are my books, plays: other children I don’t need. In French my novel has already appeared: Nous autres (NRF pub.); another novel will probably come out soon—Au bout du monde; several of my stories are in various Parisian revues.3 And finally, in your excellent Baedeker—La littérature russe contemporaine—the literary traveller will find sufficient material about _ ”4 me. il

Qtl

“The most vital subjects in contemporary Russian literature? This isn’t such a simple question. Probably you read in Lu not long ago the translation of an interview with the group of ‘proletarian writers'—‘Le plan quinquenal littéraire.’5 The author of the interview is right: for the last 1-1/2 to 2 years the attempt has been made in Russia to apply to literature the same system of ‘planned economy,’ state-party regulation, as has been applied to industry. “But there are laws of mechanics—in the present instance, social mechanics. If you strike a heavy body with force, let's say a metal ball, you will impart great speed to it. And the iron ball of industrialization, once stricken, has rolled with a speed unprecedented in Russia. But if you try to strike such an ethereal substance as literature or theater—this substance, perhaps, will only dissipate, thin out from the blow. "And this is what happened. Within ‘Le plan quinquenal littéraire’ the task was set to reflect immediately in literature, in the theater, the processes of the industrial revolution taking place in the country. And literature for the moment proved itself in no condition to solve this problem. With isolated, and even then debatable exceptions, no works of great artistic value have appeared on the subject of industrialization. Superbly disciplined, like soldiers, writers diligently took up these subjects, a great number of sketches were published describing various industries, types of construction, ‘giants.’ But in most cases, next to the giants these sketches were pygmies which plunged very quickly into Lethe. And I hasten to add: fortunately, for the authors. Because the greater part of them, especially from the group of so-called 'fellow travellers,’ are people very illiterate in respect to industrial technology. I, as you know, am an engineer, and more than once I have blushed for

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these authors when I read their dilettante sketches. Most likely, for readers among the workers they sometimes take the place of humor magazines. "The machine—this is not paysage and not nature morte: in order to write about the machine you have to know it, you have to live with it, you have to love it (or hate it). I think that true writing could be done on industrial subjects by people who work in industry, who are firmly linked with it. But. . . and here is the opposite 'but,' the technology of literary craftsmanship is itself a very fine and complex matter. Qualified special­ ists from industry prove themselves dilettantes in the field of literature. The needed synthesis is not yet in sight...” H

QM

"Yes, of course, there are some very vital subjects which are not so topical or applied as ‘industrialization.’ For some of these subjects the literary climate of contemporary Russia is still unfavorable, but as soon as it becomes less severe—in my opinion—precisely these subjects will provide a rich harvest. "One such subject, treated very timidly thus far in Soviet literature, is the question of the relationship between the person and the collective, the person and the state. In present practice, this question is decided entirely in favor of the state, but such a decision cannot fail to be merely temporary: in a state which sets as its final task the reduction of state power to naught, this problem sooner or later must certainly arise in a very sharp form. And precisely this problem—true, set within the framework of a utopian parody constructed out of a reductio ad absurdum of one possible solution—provides the basis for my entire novel Nous autres. Once in the Caucasus I was told a Persian fable about a rooster which had the bad habit of crowing an hour before the others: the owner of the rooster got into such awkward situations be­ cause of this that eventually he chopped off the rooster’s head. The novel Nous autres proved to be a Persian rooster: it was still too early for this question and the raising of it in such a form. And therefore, after the novel was published (in translations in various languages), the Soviet critics very much chopped off my head. But evidently I am solidly built, for as you see I still have my head on my shoulders. “Another very vital subject at present in Soviet literature, actually very closely connected with the first one, is that of the artist’s position in a society organized on new principles. This is a less dangerous, less explosive subject than the first, and in addition it touches writers more directly just now, when attempts are being made at state regulation of ‘literary industry.’ Consequently, during the last year there have appeared several extremely interesting works directly or obliquely con­

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nected with this theme. Among them, four books have attracted special attention: Okhrannaia gramota (Safe Conduct)—a novella by Pasternak, Khudozhnik neizvesten (Artist Unknown)—a novella by Kaverin, Sumasshedshii korabl' (The Mad Ship)—a novel by Forsh, and Zapiski Zanda (Notes of Zand) by Olesha.6 The authors of these books are some of the most talented in the group of so-called ‘fellow travellers.’ In their works they departed from the orthodox Marxist theory of creation, so that the ‘attention’ of which I just spoke sounded more like heavy slaps than applause ..." “...?’’ "In contrast to European literature, which simply cannot get out of the triangle de I'amour, questions of sex in contemporary Russian literature remain in the background. And this is understandable. Herzen once said something good about writers—about himself: ‘We are not the doctors, we are the pain.’ The sexual question in Russia today is decided with the least amount of pain. In fact, in this area the state does not meddle at all in private life, it is simply the notary public, registering the facts and keeping watch that the father of a child pays certain sums for its support. A number of years ago, when all this was still very new and uncustomary, sexual questions claimed greater interest from read­ ers ând writers—unfortunately, mainly second-rate writers who tossed out rather sensational novels on this subject into the market. Of the more serious works I could name the short novel by Bogdanov, Pervaia devushka (The First Girl), although this novel as well, artistically speaking, is not first-rate.7 "But this theme, of course, is immortal, and I’m sure that in the more or less distant future it will play for a time a very big role in literature. It was not a stupid man who said the resounding words: ‘Love and hunger rule the world.' Imagine that the state rally managed to solve all the problems of ‘hunger': everyone had enough pants, firewood, bread, even chocolate, even automobiles. Then the state, taking upon itself the solution to the problem of human happiness, would inevitably become interested in the theme of ’love,’ in the first instance, of course, in the area of eugenics, problems of perfecting the human race and protecting mankind from degeneration. The logical conclusion from this—state regulation of childbirth and very complex, very interesting collisions on this ground between an individual and the state. For artists of the word this will provide inexhaustible material, but this—I repeat—lies in the future. So far I recall only two or three feuille­ tons of a scientific nature devoted to this subject, published, if I am not mistaken, last year in the Moscow Pravda. But this, it seems, was only

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the crowing of a ‘Persian rooster’: these questions were not raised anymore. ‘Industrialization’ has obscured them for the time being . . . ”

Translated by G. K.

Notes 1. The untitled manuscript consists of three sheets with the actual text, in Zamyatin's now handwriting, covering five and one-half pages. 2. Lefèvre’s extensive interview of Zamyatin, entitled "Une heure avec Zamiatine, constructeur de navires, romancier et dramaturge," appeared in Les Nouvelles littéraires, No. 497 (April 23, 1932), pp. 1, 8. 3. B. Cauvet-Duhamel's translation of Zamyatin's novel We was issued by the pub­ lishing house of the Nouvelle revue française (NRF) some three years earlier under the title Nous autres (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1929). "Au Bout du monde," a translation of "Na kulichkakh," may have been intended for inclusion in a collection of Zamyatin's tales entitled Récits, which had been announced by NRF as early as 1929, but which, apparently, was never published. By the end of 1933, at least six stories and four of Zamyatin’s articles had appeared in French translation in such journals and newspapers as Europe, Lu, Marianne, Le mercure de France, La revue de France, and Voix paysanne. For a more complete listing see the bibliography of translation of Zamyatin’s works in my monograph The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamiatin (Berkeley, 1968), 248-57. 4. The reference is to Vladimir Pozner's Panorama de la littérature russe contempor­ aine (Paris: Editions Kra, 1929). Pozner, who himself had been a member of the Serapion Brothers before emigrating from Russia in the early twenties, devoted several pages to an analysis of Zamyatin's works and pointed out that "nombre de jeunes écrivains ont appris leur métier avec Zamiatine" (p. 320). 5. Since the short-lived journal Lu (Paris 1931-33) was not available to me, I was unable to verify the date and nature of the article mentioned. 6. Yury Olesha's "Something from the Secret Notes of Fellow Traveler Zand" appeared in January, 1932 (30 dnei, No. 1, pp. 11-17), while the above-mentioned works of Pasternak, Kaverin and Forsh were published as separate books by the Izdatel'stvo pisatelei in Leningrad in 1931. 7. Nikolai Bogdanov's popular povest' (tale) about the first girl member of a rural Komsomol cell appeared in 1928, and in the words of a recent Soviet critic, was imbued with the "spirit of revolutionary romanticism."

Notes prepared by Alex M. Shane

SOURCES

I. THE SOVIET VIEW 1. Alexander Voronsky, “Evgeny Zamyatin," trans, by Paul Mitchell, Russian Litera­ ture Triquarterly No. 2, 1972, 153-175. Original source: Krasnaia nov' No. 6 (Moscow, 1922), 304-322. 2. Viktor Shklovksy, "Potolok Evgeniia Zamyatina,” in Piaf chelovek znakomykh ("Five People I Have Known,” Tiflis: Zakkniga, 1927), 43-67. The English version pub­ lished here for the first time is from pp. 66-67. From the mention of the forthcoming English translation of We, this article appears to have been written by Shklovsky in 1924. At this time Shklovsky had taken advantage of a Soviet amnesty for refugees and had returned to Petrograd. The enfant-terrible Marxist-baiting critic was on very good behavior at this time, and probably no longer on good terms with Zamyatin. At a supper to honor H.G. Wells in the same year, Shklovsky hysterically reviled the visiting Englishman for his lack of Bolshevist spirit, much to the chagrin of host Zamyatin. (See the memoirs of Yury Annenkov.) Shklovsky's comments on We are noteworthy in that the Formalist critic attempts to discredit the novel on aesthetic grounds and excels himself In skimpiness. 3. M.M. Kuznetsov, Sovetskii roman: ocherki (“The Soviet Novel: Essays,” Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1963), 131-136. The excerpt in English is published here for the first time. It would be fun to pick out all the falsehoods in this tirade, but it would probably bore the reader. Suffice it to say that this is one of those accounts which condemn a book Soviet citizens are not permitted to read, so that the most interesting thing for them might well be the citations from the novel. In this respect the account is exceptional, one of the longest surveys of Zamyatin in Soviet criticism and one of the very few to quote directly from the detested work (albeit without reference to the source). Aside from this, Kuznet­ sov is standard: We has no verbal invention, no Soviet coloration, no outpourings of the unconscious, etc. He cites Voronsky and Gorky as authorities while upholding the good­ ness of Soviet Marxism, neglecting to mention that Voronsky was arrested in 1935 and executed in 1943, while Gorky perished in 1936 under mysterious circumstances. 4. O.N. Mikhailov, "Zamiatin," Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1964). This entry in the literary encyclopedia admits Zamyatin’s virtues as a pre-revolutionary writer and even includes Zamyatin within the tradition of "critical realism"—i.e., the purported predecessor of Socialist Realism. Beyond this, the critic runs into trouble: a writer’s critical approach to society was fine before the Revolution, but “anti-Soviet" afterwards. Mikhailov's factual errors (pub. place of We, name of Aldous Huxley) are kept in the translation to indicate the level of scholarship on Zamyatin in the USSR.

301

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Sources

II. MYTHIC CRITICISM 5. Richard A. Gregg, "Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible and We,” Slavic Review No. 4, 1965, 680-687. Gregg's identifications (footnote 25) at first struck me as far-fetched, but they work and in time convinced me. Gregg cites Zamyatin's “compounded ironies" as a case of artistic failure, but must they fit the critic’s scheme to be an artistic success? 6. Christopher Collins, "Zamjatin’s We as Myth," Slavic and East European Journal No. 2, 1966, 125-133. 7. Owen Ulph, "I-330: Reconsiderations on the Sex of Satan," Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 9, 1974 (Women’s issue), 262-275.

III. AESTHETICS

8. Carl R. Proffer, "Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin’s We,” Slavic and East European Journal No. 3, 1963, 269-278. One of the first stylistic analyses of the novel. It makes a strong case for yellow, might have said more about green. I am not convinced that "the novel’s basic image ... is the image of the cold outer shell. . . covering a hot, seething inner core.” This is one of many images, including the omnipresent mathematical images. 9. Ray Parrott, "The Eye in We,” Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 16, 1979, 59-72. Now the eye is the basic image: "Zamyatin's major device of characterization.” Also: “The eye-symbol serves the dominant function among the aggregate of creative images 10. Gary Kern, "Zamyatin's Stylization," originally read to a graduate seminar at Princeton University, 1967. Revised for the present publication. It would have been better to start with the concept of the dominanta and then reveal its control of artistic devices. 11. Milton Ehre, "Zamjatin’s Aesthetics,” Slavic and East European Journal No. 3, 1975, 288-296. Raises many questions. What are the essential differences between Belyi and Zamyatin? What becaome of Neorealism? How does Zamyatin’s aesthetics apply to literature today? 12. Susan Layton, "Zamyatin and Literary Modernism," Slavic and East European Journal No. 3, 1973, 279-287. Skillfully describes Neorealism in the context of Modernism. The central thesis, however, remains moot: Chaadaev and Tolstoi spoke of the productivity of the void, but Zamyatin reacted to a different Russian tradition. Zamyatin's Western influences (H.G. Wells, Anatole France, Jack London) are minimized, while his connections with Gogol and Dostoevsky are emphasized. Thus he appears to be linked to Chaadaev and Tolstoi by means of Gogol and Dostoevsky. Also, it was probably inadvertent, but a misnomer to call Zamyatin an "internal emigre” (a Soviet pejorative). Zamyatin was an activist deter­ mined to play a role in his country; when the role was denied him, he elected to leave. He preferred to be an external emigre, rather than an internal one. 13. Leighton Brett Cooke, "Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin’s We,” originally read at the 1982 annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Chicago. First publication. Unquestionably the most comprehensive study of the math of We. Its central thesis is most challenging: that Zamyatin intentionally made D-503 make mistakes in math and did not make slips himself.

Sources

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IV. INFLUENCES AND COMPARISONS

14. Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor, "A Neglected Source of Zamyatin’s We,” Russian Review No. 2, 1973, 187-188. Addendum: Jerome K. Jerome, "The New Utopia’ in Diary of a Pilgrimage (and Six Essays), London, 1891. Shklovsky had noted the same source, but only in passing. His remark, however, suggests that the Jerome piece was known to Zamyatin's circle and most likely to Zamyatin himself. The obscure piece is appended for the reader’s judgment. 15. Kathleen Lewis & Harry Weber, “Zamyatin’s We, the Proletarian Poets and Bogdanov’s Red Star," Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 12, 1975, 253-278. Especially valuable in that the proletarians are not read much anymore. 16. E.J. Brown, Brave New World, 1984, and We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia (Zamyatin and English Literature), published as a separate booklet (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976), 61 pp. 17. John J. White, "Mathematical Imagery in Musil’s Young Torless and Zamyatin’s We” Comparative Literature XVIII, 1966, 71-78. Raises the question of connections between the Hapsburg Empire and Russia, and their writers. A comparison of Zamyatin and Karl Kraus, for example, would be fascinating. However, it is not customary to call Zamyatin a “Marxist." He did not call himself one and had difficulties with those so named. 18. Istvan Csicserny-Ronay, Jr., “Zamyatin and the Strugatskys: The Representation of Freedom in We and The Snail on the Slope," originally read at a conference held at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in April 1984, on the theme "Utopia and Its Discontents: Zamyatin, Orwell, Mayakovsky.” Expanded for the present publication. Another heretical deflation of Zamyatin. This one, by its passion, sounds like a cast-off lover: seduced so quickly, so easily by Zamyatin’s slick manner, the author wakes up to find that Zamyatin has left no address for future contact. The future freedom is not spelled out. Zamyatin doesn’t care—he’s a Nietzschean. But the Strugatskys don’t help much, as their ambivalence approaches “complete uncertainty.” Yet the article nicely balances Zamyatin’s relatonship to the proletarians with the Strugatskys’ relationship to developments in Soviet science. NEW ZAMYATIN MATERIALS

1. “The Presentists,” translation first published in Russian Literature Triquarterly (hereafter RLT) No. 12, 1975, 195-196. 2. "Four Letters to Lev Lunts,” Russian text in Novyi zhurnal Nos. 82 & 83, 1966. English translation—first publication. 3. A letter from Ilya Ehrenburg—Russian text and translation first published in RLT No. 2, 1972, 468—469. 4. Excerpts from letters to his wife—Russian text first published in RLT No. 7, 1973, 441-443. English translation—first publication. 5. “The Modern Russian Theater," RLT No. 12, 1975, 198-209. 6. "The Future of the Theater," Russian text and English translation in RLT No. 7, 1973, 430-440. 7. “Auto-Interview,” Russian text in RLT No. 2, 1972, 462-466. English translation—first publication.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Zamyatin In English translation:

The Dragon: Fifteen Stories, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg. New York, 1967. A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg. Chicago, 1970. The Islanders, trans. T.S. Berczynski, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 2 (Winter, 1972), 1—44. A God-Forsaken Hole, trans. Walker Foard. Ann Arbor: Ardis, forthcoming (1988). We, trans. S.D. Cioran in Russian Literature of the Twenties. An Anthology. Ann Arbor, 1987. We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Viking Press, 1972. We, ed. and trans. Bernard G. Guerney, An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak. New York, 1960, 167-353. We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg. New York, 1924 and 1959. Works about Zamyatin:

Beauchamp, Gorman, "Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamyatin's We and Orwell’s 1984," Comparative Literature Studies, X, 4 (Dec., 1973), 285-301. Brooks, Mary Ellen, "Revisionist Ideology of the Self," Literature and Ideology, 7 (1970), 15-24. Brown, Edward J., "Eugene Zamjatin as a Critic," in To Honor Roman Jakobson, l-lll. The Hague, 1967, I, 402-411. Browning, Gordon, "Toward a Set of Standards for [Evaluating] Anti-Utopian Fiction,”" Cithara, X, I (1970), 18-32. Collins, Christopher, Evgenij Zamjatin. An Interpretive Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Connors, James, "Zamyatin's We and the Genesis of 1984," Modern Fiction Studies No. 1,1975, 107-24. Deutscher, Isaac, "'1984'—The Mysticism of Cruelty," Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays. London, 1955, 35-50. Eastman, Max, "The Framing of Eugene Zamyatin," Artists in Uniform: A Study of Litera­ ture and Bureaucratism. New York, 1934, 82-93. Elliott, Robt., "The Fear of Utopia," in The Shape of Utopia. Chicago, 1970. Fischer, Peter Alfred, “A Tentative New Critique of E.l. Zamjatin," doctoral dissertation, Harvard University (1967). Hayward, M., "Pilnyak and Zamyatin: Two Tragedies of the Twenties," Survey, XXXVI (April-June, 1961), 85-91. Jackson, Robert Louis, "E. Zamyatin’s We," Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature. The Hague: Mouton, 1958, 150-57. La Bossière, Camille R., "Zamiatin’s We: A Caricature of Utopian Symmetry," Riverside Quarterly 5, 40-43.

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Bibliography

Layton, Susan J., "Zamjatin’s Neorealism in Theory and Practice,” doctoral dissertation, Yale University (1972). Orwell, G., "Freedom and Happiness," Tribune (London), No. 471 (Jan. 4, 1946), 15-16. Oulanoff, Hongor, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Parrinder, Patrick, "Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells," Science Fiction Studies I, I (1973), 17-26. Richards, D.J., "Four Utopias,” Slavonic and East European Review, XL, 94, 220-28. Richards, D.J., Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic. New York-London, 1962. Russell, R., "Literature and Revolution in Zamjatin’s We," Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 51, No. 122 (Jan. 1973). Shane, Alex M., The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamyatin. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968. Slonim, Marc, "Evgeny Zamyatin: The Ironic Dissident,” Soviet Russian Literature: Wri­ ters and Problems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, 80-89. Woodcock, George. "Utopias In Negative," Sewanee Review, LXIV (1956), 81-97.

See also the bibliography of Cooke in the Present volume.

ESSAYS ABOUT THE MAJOR RUSSIAN NOVEL ON REVOLUTION AND THE STATE

Nearly seven decades since it was written, Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel We remains a brilliant work of silence fiction political satire and experimental prose. Its basic plot, whereby a true believer comes to question the validity of a totalitaiian s’ate. has been repeated by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, George Orwell m Nineteen Eighty Four and dozens of writers and filmmakers subsequently, yet it remains unsurpassed in its artistry, proph--,