Full text of "Soviet Heretic Essays By Yevgeny Zamyatin"

A SOVIET HERETIC: ESSAYS BY Yevgeny Zamyatin EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY MIRRA GINSBURG The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London Standard Book Number: 226-97865-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-94104 The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1970 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved Published 1970 Printed in the United States of America A SOVIET HERETIC: ESSAYS BY Yevgeny Zamyatin 4 Yevgeny Zamyatin What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; ... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless “Why?” and “What next?” “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy. “The New Russian Prose” 719003 NEW MEXICO STATE !|NI\/FR‘-'ITY I IRRARY CONTENTS Illustrations ix Introduction by Alex M. Shane xi Editor’s Preface xix 1. Zamyatin about Himself Autobiography (1922) 3 Autobiography ( 1 924 ) 5 Autobiography ( 1 929 ) 7 2. The State of Russian Literature Sirin (1914) 17 Scythians? (191 8) 21 Contemporary Russian Literature (1918) 34 Tomorrow (1919) 51 I Am Afraid (1921) 53 Paradise (1921) 59 Gryadushchaya Rossiya ( 1921 ) 68 The Serapion Brethren (1922) 75 On Synthetism (1922) 81 The New Russian Prose (1923) 92 On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters (1923) 107 vii CONTENTS viii The Day and the Age ( 1 924 ) 113 The Goal (1926?) 127 A Piece for an Anthology on Books (1928) 131 Moscow-Petersburg (1933) 132 3. The Writer's Craft The Psychology of Creative Work (1919-20) 159 Theme and Plot (1919-20) 165 On Language (191 9-20 ) 175 Backstage (1930) 190 4. Eight Writers and One Painter Alexander Blok ( 1 924 ) 205 Fyodor Sologub (1924) 217 Chekhov (1925) 224 Meetings with Kustodiev (1928) 231 Andrey Bely (1934) 241 Maxim Gorky (1936) 246 H.G. Wells (1922) 259 O. Henry (1923) 291 Anatole France (1924) 296 5. Two Letters Letter of Resignation from the Writers’ Union (1929) 301 Letter to Stalin (1931) 305 Sources 310 Index 313 ILLUSTRATIONS Portraits by Yury Annenkov Yevgeny Zamyatin frontispiece Alexey Remizov 28 Vladimir Mayakovsky 54 Boris Pilnyak 64 Mikhail Zoshchenko 77 Yury Annenkov 83 Korney Chukovsky 89 Isaac Babel 122 Sergey Yesenin 146 Alexander Blok 214 Fyodor Sologub 220 Maxim Gorky 252 H. G. Wells 274 IX INTRODUCTION: ZAMYATIN THE CRITIC Until recently Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was known in the West primarily as the author of We, an anti-Utopian novel that first appeared in English translation in 1924 but has yet to be published in the Soviet Union, where it was written in 1920 and 1921. With the publication of The Dragon (New York, 1966), a collection of fifteen stories translated by Mirra Ginsburg, Za- myatin’s accomplishments as a master stylist and narrator be- came accessible to the American reading public. The present collection of essays in translation reveals hitherto unexplored but intrinsically important areas of Zamyatin’s creative art: those of critic, essayist, memoirist, and lecturer. A schoolteacher’s son, Zamyatin was born on February 1, 1884, in the small provincial town of Lebedyan, which over- looked the River Don some two hundred miles south of Moscow and was known for its swindlers, gypsies, horsefairs, and robust Russian speech. Despite the local color, Zamyatin found life in the provinces gray and monotonous — a theme that recurred throughout his early fiction. In 1902 he enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute and was immediately caught up in the capital’s ferment. He joined the Bolshevik party, took part in the Revolution of 1905, was imprisoned and exiled, but re- turned illegally to continue his studies at the institute. He grad- uated as a naval engineer in 1908, and was retained by the institute. Although the next three years were devoted to shipbuilding, he did find time to write and publish his first two stories, “Alone” (1908) and “The Girl” (1910), which deservedly passed with- xi INTRODUCTION xii out notice. In 191 1 the forced inactivity of renewed exile enabled him to begin writing A Provincial Tale (published in 1913), his first major work, which brought him immediate literary fame. Reprieved in the general amnesty of political prisoners on the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913, Zamyatin again took up shipbuilding and in March 1916 was commissioned to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers in England. A year and a half later, he returned to Petersburg in time to witness the October Revolution and thereafter devoted all his energies to writing and to related literary activities. In addition to holding various administrative positions on the executive councils of literary groups such as the Union of Practitioners of Imaginative Literature, the All-Russian Union of Writers, the House of the Arts, and the House of Writers, Zamyatin lectured on the craft of fiction in the literary studios of the House of the Arts and the World Literature Publishing House. His editorial activities in- cluded work on three journals — Dom iskusstv [House of the arts, 1921], Sovremenny zapad [Contemporary West, 1922-24], and Russky sovremennik [Russian contemporary, 1924] — as well as the coeditorship, with Korney Chukovsky, of World Literature’s English section. During this post-revolutionary pe- riod Zamyatin was widely recognized as one of the leading figures in Russian literature; some Soviet critics considered him to be on a par with Gorky and Bely in stature and in- fluence. Continued attacks on Zamyatin throughout the twenties by Communist critics who had no taste for his “pernicious” ideology culminated in a defamatory campaign which ostracized him from Soviet literature in the autumn of 1929. The ostensible, although somewhat belated reason for the attack on Zamyatin had been the publication of his novel We in the Russian emigre journal Volya Rossii [The will of Russia] in Prague during the spring of 1927. In fact, both Zamyatin and his fellow victim Pilnyak were simply the scapegoats in the government’s drive to divest the All-Russian Union of Writers of its apolitical stance and to press all writers into the service of socialist reconstruction. Through Gorky’s intercession, Zamyatin obtained permission to go abroad, and in November 1931 he and his wife left the Soviet Union, never to return. His years in exile were spent in Paris, where he remained aloof from Russian emigre circles. He died on March 10, 1937. Introduction xiii Traditionally some of Russia’s most astute and articulate critics have themselves been writers. Zamyatin is a case in point. The style and imagery of his critical essays are often equal to those of his highly polished prose fiction, while his ironic wit is given even freer — and more direct — rein. The reader of Zamya- tin’s essays sees and hears the writer who in his fiction has de- liberately concealed himself behind an objective narrative or a fictional narrator. In this respect, the essays provide an important key to understanding Zamyatin the writer. Zamyatin was a highly conscious craftsman. His finely honed “Backstage” is perhaps the best single summary of his ideas on the writer’s creative process. In addition to providing a valuable insight into the writer’s psychology at the moment of creation and the specific catalysts which precipitated certain works, Za- myatin skillfully elaborates his conception of prose rhythm (based on logical, not syllabic stress), of visual leitmotivs, of integrating images, and of the very important process of rewriting and polish- ing the finished product. His emphasis on the role of the writer’s unconscious was decried as “false and pernicious bourgeois ideology” by Soviet critics and was subjected to violent criticism in 1931 during the extensive discussions of creative method in writing, which took place in Leningrad and Moscow literary organizations. His lectures on the craft of fiction, “The Psychology of Creative Work,” “Theme and Plot,” and “Language” contain many pregnant ideas whose intrinsic significance rivals their elucidation of Zamyatin’s intent and goals in his own fiction. The lecture “Contemporary Russian Literature,” which was delivered at the People’s University of Lebedyan on September 8, 1918, stands apart from the others in that it combines a formalistic analysis of style with a historical application of Hegel’s dialectical process. The resultant definition of the Neorealistic movement in Russian fiction (which Zamyatin elsewhere calls Synthetism) represents his major contribution in the area of literary history and even today remains basic to any consideration of early twentieth-century Russian prose fiction. Zamyatin’s reminiscences, which were usually occasioned by the death of a literary acquaintance, are characterized by a sub- dued eulogistic tone and a highly personal approach. The essays on Kustodiev and Gorky convey great warmth and affection. The reminiscences about Blok, Kustodiev, Bely, and Gorky, with their INTRODUCTION xiv direct, personal approach and lucid, unconstrained style, high- light a few salient characteristics and incidents, infusing our image of these men with the fresh breath of life. Rather different in char- acter is Zamyatin’s brief and controversial appreciation of Ana- tole France. Himself an ironist of note, Zamyatin was very much attracted by France’s irony, skepticism, and relativism; and, true to his predilection for polarity, he extravagantly juxtaposed France and Leo Tolstoy (with his absolutism and faith) as the two contrasting peaks of French and Russian cultures. It is sig- nificant that Anatole France symbolized to Zamyatin that peculiar European quality of satiric irony which he felt to be lacking in Russian literature and hoped to contribute with his own works. In this respect, the obituary on France is more closely related to Zamyatin’s programmatic essays than to his reminiscences. A third type of essay evolved in connection with his activities for the World Literature Publishing House, for which he edited fifteen volumes, including works by H. G. Wells, Jack London, G. B. Shaw, O. Henry, Upton Sinclair, and Romain Rolland. His introductory essays were, by and large, intended for the general Russian reader unfamiliar with modern European literature — hence their rather limited scope. Nonetheless, they frequently were revealing of Zamyatin’s own artistic inclinations and criteria. His excellent introduction to a collection of O. Henry’s stories included an astute formalistic analysis of style and structure in the manner of his lectures on the craft of fiction and revealed his growing interest in plot dynamism, which became apparent in his own ironic short stories of the twenties. But undoubtedly his slender brochure on H. G. Wells, which was published in 1922 after he had written half a dozen different introductions to sepa- rate volumes of Wells, marked the zenith of his achievement in this vein. Displaying a far-ranging grasp of Wells’s entire literary output and of the utopian literary tradition in general, Zamyatin succeeded in creating one of the best critical summations of Wells’s novels, both fantastic and realistic. Many prominent features such as the combination of fantasy with a scientific base, the recurrent appeal to the humanistic tradition, the use of the future to mirror social ills of the present, the hatred of philistin- ism, the vision of our world from a new “aeroplanar” perpective — all these and more, found fertile ground in Zamyatin’s critical essays as well as in his dystopia We. XV Introduction Zamyatin’s most stimulating writing, however, is to be found in his finely wrought programmatic essays and polemical criti- cisms of contemporary Russian literature. Giving full rein to clever irony and penetrating wit, Zamyatin skillfully derides all that is trite while encouraging the original. His romantic philos- ophy, which he continued propounding in the face of increasing hostility, remains especially relevant today in a world of growing pressures for conformity. Zamyatin began his career as a critic in 1914 with three reviews in V. S. Mirolyubov’s Y ezhemesyach- nuy zhurnal [Monthly journal]. Although of no great intrinsic value, these reviews eloquently reveal his inclination for a polished style and extended comparisons, which create an artistic unity far superior to those of the standard review. His first sig- nificant polemical essay, ostensibly a review of the Scythian group’s second literary miscellany, was appropriately entitled “Scythians?” and appeared in 1918 under the pseudonym Mikhail Platonov. Himself a member of the group, Zamyatin challenged the statement of its leader, the literary critic and historian R. Ivanov-Razumnik, that the spiritual revolutionary “works for the near or distant future.” Unequivocally rejecting the middle-of-the-road conjunction “or,” Zamyatin argued that the true Scythian works “ only for the distant future, never for the near future, and never for the present. Hence to him there is but one way — Golgotha — and no other; and but one conceivable victory — to be crucified — and no other.” In Zamyatin’s view, the true revolutionary devoted his life to an endless seeking that promised no attainment, for to realize an idea meant to philis- tinize it. In short, he had to be an uncompromising heretic who stood isolated from the mass of the philistines and, by rejecting the present in the name of the distant future, ensured man’s never ending progress in the face of ubiquitous philistinism. Zamyatin also expressed his faith in brotherly love, in a human- ism that would establish universal peace among men (hence the warmth of his appreciation of Wellsian humanism). “Scythians?” proved to be of paramount importance in Za- myatin’s work, for it formed the philosophic nucleus not only of all future essays, but of his philosophic chef d’oeuvre as well — the novel We. In “Tomorrow” Zamyatin reaffirmed the heretic’s role in effecting the cruel but wise law of never ending dissatis- faction, onto which he grafted the Hegelian dialectic of thesis INTRODUCTION xvi (yesterday), antithesis (today), and synthesis (tomorrow). He also asserted his faith in the written word as the sole means worthy of man in seeking to achieve human progress, an idea which found new form in Zamyatin’s championing of satire as the antidote to philistinism in his lecture delivered at the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Fyodor Sologub’s literary activity (hence the eulogistic tone, which is more reminiscent of Zamyatin’s necrologies than of his critical articles). The essay “I Am Afraid,” in which Zamyatin attacked the growth of conformity spawned by nimble authors who slavishly followed changing political winds, provided Soviet critics and literary historians with several pithy quotations which they delighted in pointing to as examples of Zamyatin’s aberrant “bourgeois individualism.” They were especially incensed by such statements as: “The Proletcult art is at present a step backward to the 1860s”; “Real literature can be created only by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries”; and Zamyatin’s closing sentence, “I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past.” Similar ideas are de- veloped in “Paradise,” where Zamyatin ridicules the “majestic, monumental, and all-encompassing unanimity” of the proletarian poets, which results in gray, monophonic banality, and in “The Day and the Age,” where a distinction is made between the topical literature and nimble authors, which lives only for today, and the truly contemporary literature that lives for an entire age. A notable portion of Zamyatin’s essays of the twenties was devoted to the development of his conceptions of the energy- entropy dichotomy on a sociophilosophical level and of Syn- thetism in contemporary Russian literature. While writing his fascinating biography of the founding father of modern thermo- dynamic theory, Julius Robert von Mayer, 1 Zamyatin was undoubtedly struck by the analogy between Mayer’s thermo- dynamic concept of entropy (“the tendency of the universe’s energy toward rest — toward death”) and his own conception of human society as reflected in The Islanders (1918) and “The North” (1922, written in 1918), where the universal tendency toward philistinism and spiritual death corresponded to entropy, 1 This biography was not included in the present volume both because of its length and because it bears only tangentially on the main subject of this collection — literature . — Editor XVII Introduction while solar energy (Mayer’s energy source corresponded to Zamyatin’s symbolism) stimulated the ardent passions, spiritual or corporeal, which disrupted the tendency toward a lukewarm philistine equilibrium. The philosophic conception of energy and entropy became the central thesis in We, where the heroine 1-330 states that “There are two powers in the world — entropy and energy. One leads to blissful rest, to a happy equilibrium; the other — to the destruction of equilibrium; to a tormentingly end- less movement.” In October 1923, probably under the stimulus of an unusual essay on solar energy published in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1923) by the British physicist and physiologist Frank C. Eve, Zamyatin summarized all his basic philosophical thinking in a brilliant essay entitled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.” Eve, in analyzing the basic motive power of life itself in physical terms of an energy flow to a lower potential, essentially removed the distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry. Entranced by the scientific extension of physical (thermodynamic) concepts to biology (life itself), Zamyatin went a step further and extended the concepts of energy and entropy to the social sciences and philosophy. Con- versely, he extended sociophilosophic concepts, such as revolu- tion, to the physical and biological sciences. Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasuraby greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law — like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy). Someday, an exact formula for the law of revo- lution will be established. And in this formula, nations, classes, stars — and books — will be expressed as numerical quantities. But the essence of Zamyatin’s philosophy, although cast in a new scientific form, had not changed appreciably from that expressed five years earlier in his essay on the Scythians. Synthetism, a legacy of the Hegelian dialectic which Zamyatin used synonymously with Neorealism, received its greatest elabo- ration in his essay on the art and graphics of Yury Annenkov. Equally applicable to Zamyatin’s own literary work, Synthetism INTRODUCTION xviii in literature signified a compressed style, the union of fantasy and reality, Impressionism, and a significant philosophic synthesis that looked to the future, for true Realism consists in the distortion of “objective” reality. The same concepts underlay Zamyatin’s extensive survey of contemporary fiction (“The New Russian Prose”), in which he rejected the proletarian return to pre- revolutionary analytical Realism in favor of formal experimenta- tion and artistic synthesis. His final review of Russian literature of the 1920s, included in “Moscow-Petersburg,” lacks the polemical verve of his earlier essays due to its retrospective char- acter and foreign audience (it was written in France) , but its calm tone in no way minimizes the sensitive perception of Zamyatin the critic and historian. The legacy of Zamyatin the critic is no less significant than that of Zamyatin the writer. The American reader is fortunate in gain- ing access to nearly all of Zamyatin’s important critical works, for he can now judge for himself the extent of Zamyatin’s contribu- tion to Russian literature. University of California at Davis Alex M. Shane EDITOR'S PREFACE Yevgeny Zamyatin the critic and teacher was probably as influ- ential in Soviet literature of the 1920s as Zamyatin the writer of fiction. A consummate craftsman, he was enormously concerned with the problems of craft. But he was also a thoroughly “engaged” writer, equally involved with the problem of the artist in society — a problem, as he saw it, both political and philosophic. He had an extraordinary sense of time, of the constant flow and flux of history. And it was perhaps his refusal to accept the absolute — as well as the romantic humanist values he refused to abandon — that brought him into sharpest conflict with the absolutist regime. These informal essays, many of them written in the heat of battle, reflect a time when conflict of ideas was still possible in Communist Russia, even if dissent was becoming increasingly dangerous. Always lucid, always witty, original, courageous, merciless to cant and warmly generous, the essays are a portrait of an epoch and a portrait of a man and an artist. Yet because the conflict of the period was so fundamental, because it still persists, in Russia and elsewhere, and because Zamyatin’s thought always rose above the specifics of the moment, the essays retain a great deal of their freshness and validity today. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Alex M. Shane, author of an excellent study, The Life and Works of Evgeni j Zamjatin, for his gracious consent to write an introduction to the xix PREFACE xx present volume and his unstinting help in its preparation. He generously supplied me with bibliographic data and the texts of a number of essays which are not easily available (particularly “Scythians?” “Paradise” and “Gryadushchaya Rossiya,” signed by the pseudonym of Mikhail Platonov) . For this, both the reader and I owe him thanks. Warm thanks are also due to Yury Annenkov and the Inter- Language Literary Associates for permission to use the mag- nificent portraits which illustrate this volume. I am grateful to Possev Verlag, publishers of Grani, for per- mission to translate the essays “Contemporary Russian Litera- ture” and “The Psychology of Creative Works.” I also wish to thank Roman Goul, editor of Novy zhurnal, for permission to translate “Moscow-Petersburg,” “Theme and Plot,” and “On Language.” The largest number of essays included here appeared in the collection Litsa, published in 1955 by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York. I am grateful to the National Board of Young Men’s Christian Associations, present owners of legal rights to books published by the Chekhov Publishing House, for permission to use them. I am especially grateful to the National Translation Center of Austin, Texas, for the grant which made it possible for me to do the extensive research required in the preparation of this volume. And, finally, warm thanks are due to Gunther Stuhlmann, my agent and friend, for his unfailing encouragement and good advice. AUTOBIOGRAPHY And so you insist on my autobiography. But you will have to content yourself with a purely external view, with perhaps a fleet- ing glance into darkened windows: I rarely invite anyone to come inside. And from the outside you will not see much. You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on the sofa, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playing Chopin. Two steps away from Chopin, and you are in the midst of provincial life: win- dows with geraniums, a piglet tied to a stake, in the middle of the street, and hens bathing in the dust. If you want geography, it’s this: Lebedyan, the most Russian of towns, in Tambov Province — a town about which Tolstoy and Turgenev wrote. Time: end of the 1880s, early 1890s. After that, Voronezh, gimnaziya, boarding school, boredom, mad dogs at Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. One of them nipped my leg. I was very fond at that time of experimenting with myself, and 1 decided to wait and see — would I, or would I not go mad? But the main thing was curiosity — what would I feel when the incubation period (two weeks after the bite) was over and I started going mad? I felt a great deal but did not develop rabies. Therefore I declared to the school authorities that I was rabid and was promptly shipped off to Moscow for inoculations. At school I received marks of Excellent on compositions but In the eady 1920s much stress was laid in Soviet Russia on the biog- raphies of writers, and numerous autobiographical sketches, written in response to questionnaires, were published in periodicals, collections, and as prefaces to volumes of the given author’s works. — Editor 3 ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 4 was not always on easy terms with mathematics. This was per- haps why (out of stubbornness) I chose the most mathematical of professions, naval engineering, which I studied at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Thirteen years ago in May (snow fell on the flowers that May) I finished my qualifying projects in engineering and my first story. The story was pub- lished then and there in the old Obrazovaniye [Education]. Well, then, this meant that I could write stories and get them published. Hence, for the next three years, I wrote — about icebreakers, about motorships, about “Theoretical Investigations into the Functioning of Dredges.” This had to be: I was retained as an instructor in the Department of Naval Architecture of the Ship- building Faculty (lam still teaching there today). If I have any place in Russian literature, I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police: in 1911 they exiled me from Petersburg, and for the next two years I led an extremely isolated life in Lakhta. There, in the white winter silence and the green silence of summer, I wrote A Provincial Tale. After which the late Izmailov 1 decided in print that I was a shaggy provincial in high boots, with a thick cane — and was astonished to find me altogether different. I had become altogether different, however, only after two years in England during the war. In England I built ships, looked at ruined castles, listened to the thud of bombs dropped by Ger- man zeppelins, and wrote The Islanders. I regret that I did not see the February Revolution and know only the October Revolu- tion (I returned to Petersburg, past German submarines, in a ship with lights out, wearing a life belt all the time, just in time for October. This is the same as never having been in love and wak- ing up one morning already married for ten years or so. Today I do not write much — probably because I am becoming ever more demanding of myself. Three new volumes of my works (At the World's End , The Islanders , and Tales for Grown-up Children ) have lain for the past three years at the Grzhebin Publishing House and are only now going into type. The fourth volume will be my novel We — my most jesting and most serious work. But perhaps the most interesting and most serious stories have not been written by me, but have happened to me. 1922 1 A. A. Izmailov (1873-1921), critic and journalist. AUTOBIOGRAPHY At the very center of the map there is a tiny circle — Lebedyan, which Tolstoy and Turgenev wrote about. I was born in Lebed- yan, in 1884. I grew up under the piano — my mother was a fine musician. I began to read at the age of four. My childhood was spent almost without friends. My friends were books. I still re- member how I shivered over Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova and Turgenev’s “First Love.” These were my elders and, perhaps, a bit terrifying. Gogol was a friend. I finished school in Voronezh (1902) with a gold medal; the medal soon found itself in a pawnbroker’s shop in Saint Peters- burg. After high school, I attended the Saint Petersburg Poly- technic Institute (Shipbuilding Faculty). I spent the winters in Petersburg, the summers doing practical work in factories and on ships. The best of my journeys in those years was the one from Odessa to Alexandria (with stops at Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonika, Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Port Said). I was in Odessa during the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, and in Helsingfors during the Sveaborg uprising. All that seems like a whirlwind today: demonstrations on Nevsky Prospekt, cossacks, student and workers’ circles, love, huge mass meetings at the universities and the institutes. I was a Bolshevik then (today I am not) and was active in the Vyborg district. At one time my room was a clandestine printing shop. I fought the Kadets 1 in the Student Council of Class Representa- tives. The outcome of all this was, of course, a solitary cell in the prison on Shpalernaya. 1 Constitutional Democrats. 5 ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 6 I graduated from the Polytechnic in 1908 and was retained as a member of the faculty in the Department of Naval Architecture. That year I also wrote and published my first story in Obrazo - vaniye The three subsequent years were devoted entirely to engineering and articles in technical journals. I began to write seriously in 1911 (A Provincial Tale — published in Zavety [Behests]). In early 1916 1 went to England to build Russian icebreakers. One of our largest icebreakers, the Lenin (formerly the Alex- ander Nevsky ), is my work. When the English newspapers broke out with huge headlines, abdication of tsar! and revolution in Russia, I could no longer bear to remain in England. In September 1917, 1 returned to Russia. Here I have given up technical work, and now I have only two occupations, literature and teaching at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus far, I have been in solitary confinement only twice, in 1905-6 and in 1922; both times on Shpalernaya and both times, by a strange coincidence, in the same gallery. I have been exiled three times, in 1906, in 1911, and in 1922. I have been tried only once, in the Saint Petersburg District Court, for my novella At the World's End. 1924 AUTOBIOGRAPHY Several isolated moments from my earliest childhood, like holes cut in a dark, dense curtain. Our dining room, an oilcloth covered table, and on the table a dish with something strange, white, gleaming, and — a miracle — the white stuff disappears as I look, who knows where. In the dish is a piece of the still unknown universe that exists outside the room. In the dish is some snow which someone has brought in to show me. And that marvelous snow is with me to this day. The same dining room. I am in someone’s arms before the window. Outside the window, through the trees, the red sphere of the sun. Everything is darkening, and I feel that this is the end — and the most frightening thing of all is that my mother has not yet returned from somewhere. Later I learned that the some- one was my grandmother, and that I was indeed within a hairs- breadth of death at that moment. I was about a year and a half old. Later. I am two or three. For the first time, many people, a multitude, a crowd. We are in Zadonsk: my parents have come there in a charabanc and brought me with them. A church, blue smoke, chanting, lights, an epileptic woman barking like a dog, a lump in my throat. Now it is over, everybody is pushing, I am carried outside by the crowd like a bit of flotsam, and suddenly I am alone in the crowd. My father and my mother are gone, they will never come back, I am alone forever. I sit on a grave- stone in the sun, crying bitterly. For a whole hour I live in the world alone. Voronezh. A river, a very strange box of a bathhouse, and in 7 ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 8 this box (I remembered this later, when I saw polar bears in the zoo) a huge, pink, fat, bulging female body plashes about — my mother’s aunt. I feel curious and a little awed: for the first time I understand that this is a woman. I wait by the window, looking out upon an empty street, with hens bathing in the the dust. At last, our carriage appears, bring- ing father home from the gimnaziya. He sits on an absurdly elevated seat, his cane between his knees. I wait for dinner with a fast-beating heart. At dinner I solemnly unfold the newspaper and read aloud the huge letters: “Son of the Fatherland.” I have been initiated into this mysterious thing, letters. I am about four. Summer. A sudden smell of medicines. My mother and my aunt hastily shut the windows and close the balcony door. I look, with my nose pressed to the glass door: they are bringing them! The driver is dressed in a white robe; the wagon is covered with white cloth; under the cloth are people, bent, arms and legs writhing — cholera patients. The cholera infirmary is on our block, next door to us. My heart is hammering, I know the mean- ing of death. I am five or six. And finally : an airy, glasslike August morning. Distant, trans- parent pealing of bells from the monastery. I walk past the front garden before our house and know without looking: the window is open, and my mother, grandmother, and sister are looking at me. I am wearing for the first time long “street” trousers and the uniform jacket of the gimnaziya student, with a school- bag over my shoulder. The water carrier Izmashka jogs along the street with his barrel and glances at me several times. I feel proud. I am a big boy — over eight. All of this among the Tambov fields, in Lebedyan, famed for its cardsharpers, gypsies, horse fairs, and the most vivid Russian speech. The years are 1884-1893. After that — school, as gray as the cloth of our uniforms. And sometimes, in the grayness — a marvelous red flag raised on the fire tower, symbolizing, not the social revolution, but twenty de- grees of frost. 1 But in the dull, regular routine of school life, it also meant a welcome one-day revolution. The Diogenes lamp of skepticism was lit for me at the age of 1 1.e., on the Reaumur scale — equivalent to twenty-one degrees below zero Fahrenheit. 9 Autobiography , 1929 twelve. It was lit by a strapping second-grader. The shiner — blue, violet, and red — burned under my left eye for two whole weeks. I prayed for a miracle, I prayed for it to disappear. The miracle did not take place. I began to wonder. A great deal of solitude, many books, and very early — Dos- toyevsky. I still remember the shivers and the flaming cheeks as I read Netochka Nezvanova. For a long time, Dostoyevsky re- mained an elder, awesome. But Gogol was my friend (and, much later, Anatole France). From 1896 the gimnaziya in Voronezh. My specialty, which everyone knew about, was Russian compositions. Another, known to no one, was a series of experiments — to “harden” myself. I recall the spring when I was in the seventh grade. I was bitten by a mad dog. I found a textbook somewhere and read that the first symptoms of rabies usually appear after two weeks. And I decided to wait and see — Will I go mad or not? — to test both myself and fate. Those two weeks I kept a diary, the only diary I ever kept in my life. After two weeks, I did not go mad. I went to the office and reported that I had been bitten, and was immediately sent to Moscow for Pasteur injections. My experi- ment ended well. Some ten years later, during the white Peters- burg nights, when I went mad with love, I carried out another experiment on myself, more serious, but hardly more intelligent. In 1902 1 discarded the gray school uniform. My gold medal was soon pawned for twenty-five rubles in a Petersburg pawn- shop and remained there. I remember the last day, the office of the inspector. Spectacles up on his forehead, he pulled up his trousers (his trousers were always slipping down) and handed me a pamphlet. I read the author’s inscription: “To my alma mater, about which I can re- member nothing good. P. E. Shchegolev.” And the inspector sententiously drawled through his nose: “Fine, isn’t it? He also finished with a gold medal, and what does he write? Of course, he ended up in prison. My advice to you is: Don’t write. Don’t follow this path.” His admonition had no effect. Petersburg in the early 1900s — the Petersburg of Komissar- zhevskaya, Leonid Andreyev, Witte, Plehve — trotters with blue netting over their backs, rattling double-decker horsecars, stu- ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 10 dents with swords and uniforms and students in blue Russian shirts. I am a Polytechnic student, of the Russian-shirt category. On a white winter Sunday, the Nevsky Prospekt is black with slow crowds, waiting for something. The Nevsky is dominated by the Duma tower, and everyone’s eyes are glued to it. And when the signal comes — the stroke of one — dark figures stream- ing in all directions, fragments of the Marseillaise, red flags, Cos- sacks, janitors, police. The first demonstration (the first for me). 1903. And the nearer to 1905, the more feverish the unrest, the noisier our meetings. In the summer — practical work in factories, Russia, jolly third-class railway carriages resounding with banter, Sevastopol, Nizhni Novgorod, plants on the Kama River, Odessa with its port and its tramps. The summer of 1905 — unusually blue, kaleidoscopic, filled to the brim with people and events. Work on the steamship Rossiya, plying between Odessa and Alexandria. Constantinople, mosques, dervishes, bazaars, the white marble embankment of Smyrna, Bedouins in Beirut, the white tide in Jaffa, black-green Athos, plague-ridden Port Said, tawny-white Africa, Alexandria with its English policemen, sellers of stuffed alligators, the fa- mous Tartouche. Astonishing Jerusalem, altogether special and apart from everything, where I lived for a week with the family of an Arab I knew. And on return to Odessa, the epic mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. With the machinist of the Rossiya — submerged, awash in the crowd, drunk with it — I wandered all day and all night through the port, amid shots, fires, rioting. In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik at that time. In the fall of 1905 there were strikes, and the dark Nevsky Prospekt was pierced by a searchlight from the admiralty building. Octo- ber 17. Meetings in the universities. One evening in December, a friend, Nikolay B., a worker with protruding ears, came to my room in Lomansky Lane. He had with him a paper bag, of the kind that Philippov rolls were sold in. It contained pyroxylin. “I’ll leave it here, the police are on my heels.” “All right, leave it.” I can still see that bag — on the windowsill, at the left, next to the bag of sugar and the sausage. 11 Autobiography , 1929 The next day at the “revolutionary headquarters” of the Vyborg district, at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table — the police. There were about thirty of us in the mousetrap. And back in my room, on the windowsill, at the left — the bag that had once contained Philippov rolls, and under the bed — leaflets. When after being arrested and beaten up we were divided into groups, I found myself near the window with four others. Under the street light outside I caught sight of familiar faces. Snatch- ing a convenient moment, I threw out a note through the tran- som to remove everything compromising from my room and the rooms of my four comrades. This was done. But I did not know it until much later. Meanwhile, for several months in my soli- tary cell on Shpalernaya, I had dream after dream about the Philippov bag on my windowsill, at the left. In my solitary cell I was in love, studied stenography and English, and wrote poems (that was inevitable). In the spring of 1906 I was released and exiled to my native region. I could not long endure the quiet of Lebedyan, its church- bells, its little front gardens. That very summer I went back illegally to Petersburg, and from there to Helsingfors. Beneath my windows, rocks and sea. In the evenings, when faces could barely be made out, there were meetings on the gray granite. And at night we could not see each other’s faces, and the black warm rock seemed soft because she was near me, and the rays of the Sveaborg searchlights moved lightly and delicately. One day at the bathhouse a naked friend introduced me to a naked, potbellied little man. The potbellied little man turned out to be the famous captain of the Red Guards, Kok. A few days later, the Red Guards were in action. Dark spots of the Kron- stadt fleet just visible on the horizon, rising spray from shells exploding in the water, the booming of the Sveaborg guns, first strong, then slowly dying out. And, disguised, clean-shaven, with a pince-nez astride my nose, I returned to Petersburg. A parliament in the country. Little states within the state — higher educational institutions, with their own parliaments, the Councils of Class Representatives. The struggle of various par- ties, electioneering, posters, pamphlets, speeches, balloting urns. I was a member, at one time chairman, of a Council of Class Representatives. ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 12 Then came a summons to report at the police precinct. At the precinct, a green sheet of paper, concerning the search for “the university student Yevgeny Zamyatin,” subject to deportation from Petersburg. I honestly declared that I had never attended a university, 2 and that there was evidently an error in the docu- ment. I remember the police officer’s nose, hooked like a ques- tion mark. “Hm — we’ll have to make inquiries.” I moved to another district. Six months later, a second summons: “univer- sity student,” question mark, inquiries. And so, for five years, until 1911, when the error in the green sheet was finally cor- rected, and I was duly expelled from Petersburg. In 1908 I had graduated from the Shipbuilding School of the Polytechnic Institute and was retained at the Department of Naval Architecture (where I began to teach the subject in 1911). On my desk, together with the blueprints for a turret-deck ship, were the pages of my first story. I sent it to Obrazovaniye, a journal edited by Ostrogorsky; the literary department was headed by Artsybashev. In the fall of 1908, the story was pub- lished in the magazine. Today, when I meet people who have read this story, I feel as embarrassed as I do when meeting an aunt of mine, whose dress I once wetted in public at the age of two. For three years after graduation — ships, naval architecture, the slide rule, blueprints, construction, specialized articles in shipping journals — Teplokhod [The diesel ship], Russkoye sudo- khodstvo [Russian shipping], and in Izvestia Politekhnicheskogo lnstituta [News of the Polytechnic Institute]. Numerous jour- neys in Russia in connection with my work: down the Volga to Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan, the Kama River, the Donets region, the Caspian Sea, Archangel, Murmansk, the Caucasus, and Crimea. During the same years, among blueprints and figures — several stories. But I did not offer them for publication; I still felt that they were “not quite it.” “It” was found in 1911. It was a year of extraordinary white nights, a great deal of white, and a great deal of black. It was also the year of my deportation, of severe illness, of nerves frayed to the breaking point. I lived first in an empty dacha in Sestroretsk, then, in winter, in Lakhta. There, 2 Zamyatin attended a polytechnic institute. 13 Autobiography , 1929 amidst snow, solitude, quiet, I wrote A Provincial Tale. After that came close contact with the Zavety group — with Remizov, Prishvin, Ivanov-Razumnik. In 1913 (the third centennial of the Romanov dynasty), I was granted the right of residence in Petersburg. This time the doc- tors sent me away. I went to Nikolayev, where I built several dredges and wrote several stories, including the novella At the World's End. When it was published in Zavety , the issue was confiscated by the censors, and both the editors and the author were tried in court. The trial took place a short time before the February revolution; we were acquitted. The winter of 1915-16 was again windswept and stormy. It ended with a challenge to a duel in January, and my departure for England in March. My only previous visit to the West had been to Germany. Berlin had impressed me as a condensed, 80-percent version of Petersburg. In England it was quite different: everything was as new and strange as Alexandria and Jerusalem had been some years before. In England it was at first all iron, machines, blueprints. I built icebreakers in Glasgow, Newcastle, Sunderland, South Shields (among them, one of our largest icebreakers, the Lenin). The Germans showered us with bombs from zeppelins and airplanes. I was writing The Islanders. When the newspapers broke out with huge headlines, revo- lution IN RUSSIA, ABDICATION OF THE RUSSIAN TSAR, I COUld no longer bear to remain in England. In September of 1917, on an antiquated little British ship (expendable — it would be no great loss if the Germans should sink it), I returned to Russia. The journey to Bergen took a long time, about fifty hours, with lights out, life belts on at all times, lifeboats ready. The merry, eerie winter of 1917-18, when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown. Shiplike houses, gunshots, searches, night watches, tenants’ clubs. Later, streets without streetcars, long queues of people with sacks, miles and miles of walking daily, potbellied “bourgeois” stoves, herring, oats ground in the coffee mill. And, along with the oats, all sorts of world-shaking plans: publication of all the classics of all periods and all countries, a united organization of all artists in every field, the staging of the entire history of the ZAMYATIN ABOUT HIMSELF 14 world in a series of plays. This was no time for blueprints; prac- tical technology dried up and fell away from me like a yellowed leaf (all that remained of it was my teaching at the Polytechnic Institute). And, at the same time, I gave a course on the newest Russian literature at the Hertzen Pedagogical Institute (1920- 21 ), and a course on the technique of literary prose at the studio of the House of the Arts. I was a member of the editorial board of the World Literature Publishing House, the Committee of the Writers’ House, the Council of the House of the Arts, the Sec- tion on Historical Plays; I was active in several publishing houses (Grzhebin’s, Alkonost, Petropolis, Mysl); I helped to edit the journals, Dom iskusstv [House of the arts], Sovremenny zapad [Contemporary West], Russky sovremennik [Russian contem- porary]. I wrote relatively little during those years. Among my longer works, I wrote the novel We, which appeared in English in 1925, and later in translations into other languages; the novel has not yet been published in Russian. In 1925 I turned to the theater, with the plays The Flea and The Society of Honorary Bell Ringers. The Flea was first pro- duced at the Moscow Art Theater on February 2, 1925; The Society of Honorary Bell Ringers, in the former Mikhailovsky Theater in Leningrad, in November of 1925. A new play, the tragedy Attila, was finished in 1928. In Attila I came to the verge of poetry. Now I am returning to the novel and to short stories. I think that had I not come back to Russia in 1917, had I not lived all these years with Russia, I would not have been able to write. I have seen much: in Petersburg, in Moscow, in the small towns of Tambov Province, in villages in Vologda and Pskov Provinces, in third-class railway carriages and freight cars. And so the circle closes. I still do not know, do not see what curves my life will follow in the future. 1929 SIRIN In springtime, the hurdy-gurdy starts its mournful wailing in the yards, a wretched, frozen bird jumps up onto the box to pick out tickets with your fortune, someone shakes his rags, tinkles his bells, and starts a jolly song. But it is sad to hear this song, and frightening to look down into the well of the courtyard; it’s all you can do not to shut the window. And when they spread their little rug, and the inevitable rubber boy leaps onto it and starts walking with his head between his legs, you cannot bear it any longer — you are both sorry for the child and repelled by his antics — and you slam the window. You feel as sorry for Andrey Bely when you read his novel Petersburg as you do for the poor rubber boy . 1 It’s no easy task to twist yourself into a pretzel, head between legs, and carry on in that position for three hundred pages without a respite. A difficult profession — it makes your heart bleed to think of it! The wretched rubber boy was made to don a clown’s costume and pushed out front by heartless people to face the audience. And he begins to send up his witticisms to the gallery: “Your excellencies, your highnesses, your honors . . “Nev- sky Prospekt, like every other avenue, is a public avenue, that is to say, an avenue for the circulation of the public (and not air, for example).” “Apollon Apollonovich was of very respectable descent: his ancestor was Adam. ...” The rubber boy says “not air, for example” or “his ancestor 1 Zamyatin’s estimate of Bely was radically revised in subsequent years (see “Contemporary Russian Literature” and the essay on Bely in this volume ) . 17 THE STATE OF RUSSIAN LITERATU RE 18 was Adam” and is the first to roar with laughter. But to the public, to those with softer hearts, it isn’t funny at all. Ah, so it isn’t funny? Well, in that case the rubber boy will astound you with his art, his antics, his unnatural contortions — he’ll stick his head between his legs, if need be, but astound you he will. “In a certain important place there occurred an appearance of extreme importance; the appearance occurred, that is to say, it was.” “Likhutin rushed headlong into the hallway (I mean, simply into the hall).” Or take the chapter headings: “And, Having Seen, Expanded,” “Of Two Poorly Dressed Little Students,” “And His Face Was Shiny,” and so on and on. And, of course, the novel abounds in contortions — “mira- cleries,” “flamings,” “Septemberly night,” “Octoberly day.” “Septemberly” and “Octoberly” — try and get anyone to say such things of his own free will! No one will do it, not for anything — his conscience will speak up: it’s too offensive. But Andrey Bely . . . Yet, look we must: Andrey Bely also plays the part of the bird atop the hurdy-gurdy, the one that picks out tickets with your fortune, or misfortune. Andrey Bely prophesies every kind of disaster for Russia: “There will be a leap over history; there will be a great upheaval; the earth will crack; the very mountains will tumble from the great quake, and the plains will everywhere rise up in humps . . .” “I await thee, Kulikovo Field! 2 On that day the last sun will shine over my native land.” A cruel destiny pursues our rubber boy: when he twists him- self into pretzels to amuse you, you pity him; when he prognosti- cates in a sepulchral voice, you want to laugh. And this destiny of his is all the more cruel because he is not untalented. If Bely were without talent, what the devil, there would be no reason to feel sorry. But even in his Petersburg you see a keen eye and valuable ideas: he wants to grasp all of the Russian revolution, from the very top down to the lowliest policeman. Take, for instance, Senator Ableukhov (for all the 2 Kulikovo Field on the Don River, the scene of a great battle in the fourteenth century, in which the Russians defeated the Tartars of the Golden Horde. 19 “Sirin” world, a picture of Pobedonostsev , 3 of blessed memory). What a portrait! Protruding ears, face of an aged infant; bookcases with innumerable shelves, each marked with a letter; favorite reading, planimetry; fear of open space. Well done, you feel in the presence of a true spark of God. And all the more pity that Bely uses this spark to light lanterns in a second-rate raree-show. Reading Blok after Andrey Bely is like coming out of a smoke- filled show booth into the clear, still night. Blok is bright and frosty, but in the cold distance flash the inconstant, tender stars. And it is toward them, the unattainable, that Blok directs his steps — toward the Fair Lady, who does not exist, who is a dream, the road toward whom means suffering. The Rose and the Cross , Blok’s play in the first issue of Sirin, is about knights, castles, minstrels, and tournaments, and yet the play is ours, it is close to us, it is Russian. It calls us to suffering, it says that there is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man. And what could be more Russian? Whatever else we may or may not know, we know how to suffer. And here are Remizov’s tales — also Russian, and also full of suffering: about the sun, God’s tear; about the angel of doom and the angel guardian of pain. Remizov is deeply, truly Russian not only in the essence but also in the form of his tales. But these tales do not contain all of Remizov, all of his power; they are not his Sisters in the Cross and not “The Irrepressible Tambourin.” Fyodor Sologub’s poems in the first collection are very simple, unwontedly simple. Simplicity does not sit well with Sologub. It’s like dressing up Mephistopheles as a respectable German burgher, with a pipe in his mouth and a mug of beer in his hand. Not bad, but not Mephistopheles. No. In Bryusov’s poems, in the second issue, there is a different simplicity — contrived, artful. Bryusov is true to himself. Some of his poems are wonderfully good (“Persian Quatrains”); others, where Bryusov, following in Balmont’s steps, descends to the savages, are something else again. The road to the savages is dangerous: Balmont has come down along this road to his fa- mous “Huitzilopochtli.” 3 K. P. Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), reactionary statesman, procurator of the holy synod in Russia during the last decades of the nineteenth cen- tury and the early years of the twentieth. THE STATE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE 20 One righteous man, they say, can save ten drowning sinners. But in Sirin the sins of the unrepentant Andrey Bely are so great both in kind and in number (350 pages out of 500!) that they drag both issues down to the bottom. 1914 SCYTHIANS? There is no target against which the Scythian will fear to draw his bow Preface to Skify, book 1 A solitary, savage horseman — a Scythian — gallops across the green steppe, hair streaming in the wind. Where is he galloping? Nowhere. What for? For no reason. He gallops simply because he is a Scythian, because he has become one with his horse, be- cause he is a centaur, and the dearest things to him are freedom, solitude, his horse, the wide expanse of the steppe. The Scythian is an eternal nomad. Today he is here, tomor- row, there. Being attached to one place is unbearable to him. And if in his wild gallop he should chance upon a fenced town, the will give it a wide detour. The very odor of a dwelling, of settled existence, of cabbage soup, is intolerable to the Scythian. He is alive only in the wild, free gallop, only in the open steppe. This is how we see the Scythian. And therefore we rejoiced in the appearance of the Skify anthologies. Here, we thought, we’ll surely find unlabeled men, here we shall breathe the air of love for true, eternally untamed freedom. After all, we have been promised from the first page that “There is no target against which the Scythian will fear to draw his bow.” But pages turned, and days. Znamya truda [The banner of labor] has blossomed forth, the second book of Skify has come out. And it is bitter to see the Scythian bow bound to service, Zamyatin published this article under the pen name of Mikhail Platonov. 21 THE STATE OF RUSSIAN LITERATE RE 22 the centaurs in stables, freemen marching to the sounds of a band. The Scythians have settled down. Too soon, there was a target against which they “feared to draw their bow.” The spiritual revolutionary, the genuine freeman and Scythian, is envisaged by Ivanov-Razumnik 1 thus: he “works for the near or distant future,” he knows that “the way of the revolution is verily a way of the cross.” We can almost agree with this defini- tion, but how often “almost” makes a world of difference. The true Scythian does not know of any straddling “or.” He works only for the distant future, never for the near future, and never for the present. Hence to him there is one way — Golgotha — and no other, and one conceivable victory — to be crucified — and no other. Christ on Golgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death drop by drop, is the victor — because he has been crucified, be- cause, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ vic- torious in practical terms is the grand inquisitor. And worse, Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk- lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand and collects donations with the left. The Fair Lady, in legal marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night and a migraine in the morning. And Marx, come down to earth, is simply a Krylenko . 2 Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom, because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement forward. The realization, materialization, practical victory of an idea immediately gives it a philistine hue. And the true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock, the odor of Krylenko — and will hasten away from the dwellings, into the steppe, to freedom. This is the tragedy and the bitter, racking happiness of the 1 R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1946), critic and sociologist; after the revolution of October 1917, a member of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries; leader of the Scythians, a literary group that included Blok and Bely; and editor of Skify. Subsequently, he spent many years in prison and penal exile during the Stalin regime. 2 N. V. Krylenko (1885-1940), leading Bolshevik, Commissar of War in the first Bolshevik government. In 1918 he became public prosecutor in revolutionary tribunals. 23 Scythians? true Scythian: he can never rest on laurels, he will never be with the practical victors, with those who rejoice and sing “Glory be.” 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, includ- ing the Soviet republic, been rewarded only by a lodging at gov- ernment expense — prison. “The victorious October Revolution,” as it is referred to in official sources, in Pravda and Znamya truda, has not escaped the general law on becoming victorious: it has turned philistine. What the priest in the purple cassock hates most of all is the heretic who does not recognize his exclusive right to bind and to permit. What Mrs. So-and-So with her hair curlers hates most of all is the Fair Lady who does not recognize her sole right to the prerogatives of love. And what every philistine hates most of all is the rebel who dares to think differently from him. Hatred of freedom is the surest symptom of this deadly disease, philistinism. Shave all heads down to the skin; dress everybody in the regu- lation uniform; convert all heretical lands to your own faith by artillery fire. This was how the Osmanlis converted the giaours to the true faith; this was how the Teutonic Knights saved heath- ens from eternal flames — by the sword and by temporal flames; this was how dissenters, sectarians, and socialists were cured of their errors in Russia. And is it not the same today? Konstantin Pobedonostsev is dead — long live Konstantin Pobedonostsev!* But this is not the Scythians’ cry. Their cry is an eternal “Down with — !” And if a Scythian is found in the camp of the victors, harnessed to the triumphal chariot, then he is not he, he is not a Scythian and has no right to this free name. Fortunately, it is not so easy to shave a Scythian’s head. The prickly heretic stubble will persist for a long time, and — even when he is already in the stable — the centaur will continue for a long time, by old habit, to neigh at the wrong times. And per- haps this is why, despite the praiseworthy efforts of the chief Pobedonostsev, identified in a footnote to the preceding essay, was notorious for his persecution of nonconformists. Zamyatin’s reference also contains the elements of a pun, since Pobedonostsev’s name is derived from pobeda, “victory.” THE STATE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE 24 overseer in the taming of the Scythians, Ivanov-Razumnik, we find images in Skify most devastating to the revolution of the victors. Perhaps the strongest, truly Scythian words were spoken by Sergey Yesenin in his poem “Otchar”: “There is no deadly free- dom in this world.” Exactly. What is deadly is not freedom, but the violation of freedom. But for those who have openly allied themselves with the victors, to speak of such things is tantamount to speaking of rope in a house where a man has hanged himself. The trouble with children! They’re always blurting out something improper in the presence of elders. And aren’t these hints in “Marfa Posadnitsa,” by the same infant, patently improper? It’s not a monk conversing with the Lord in his retreat — It is the Moscow Tsar calling out to the Antichrist: 0 Beelzebub, my heart, I’m deep in trouble, Novgorod the free won’t kiss my boot! . . . And the Tsar speaks thus to his beloved wife: There will be a great feast with rivers of red brew! 1 have sent matchmakers to the discourteous clans, There is a bed awaiting them in the dark ravine! The subjugation of the heretical Novgorods and other “dis- courteous” clans with the aid of the knife — is it permissible to speak of this today and to recall, in addition, that this was the specialty of our glorious Tsar Ivan Vasilievich? The trouble with children! However, it is not much better with adults. Even Kluyev, who occupies the place once held by the court poet Derzhavin , 4 im- prudently dreams out loud of a time when No sword, no iron hail will break The corn city’s walls, They’ll not profane the fiery face Of golden freedom. In the first issue of Skify we read these ruby red lines, watered with the heart’s blood, by Bely, who always glitters with such icy brilliance: 4 G. R. Derzhavin ( 1743-1816), poet patronized for a time by Catherine the Great. 25 Scythians? All boundaries of emotion and of truth have been erased. In worlds, in years, in hours — Nothing but bodies, bodies, bodies prone . . . And idle ashes . . . We march into the future, rank on rank! Slaves — emotionless, without souls — We’ll cover the future, as the past, Only with piles of carcasses. But this is about the Krylenkos, who have covered Russia with a pile of carcasses, who are dreaming of socialist-Napoleonic wars in Europe — throughtout the world, throughout the uni- verse! But let us not jest incautiously: Bely is trustworthy, and did not intend to speak about the Krylenkos. Ivanov-Razumnik shaved his head more carefully than other Scythians, but even his stubble stands up and pricks the wrong people, rather than those he would like to prick. In his article “Two Russias” Ivanov-Razumnik wrote: “And when their bitter hate ceases to be impotent and becomes a force, when it is given vent in actions in the name of ‘law,’ and ‘order,’ ‘in the name of Christ’ . . . Just let them gather strength and wait it out until the right moment — they will spill rivers of blood in the name of suppressing revolutionary lawlessness.” What Ivanov- Razumnik had in mind when he prophesied this was, of course, a Russian Thiers, shooting down communards on a hypothetical Russian Pere Lachaise. But by the whim of that mocker, fate, the prophecy of Ivanov-Razumnik is being fulfilled chiefly by Russian communards — in the name of their own Christ, whom they had brought down to earth. Perhaps a Thiers will also come, but what is permissible to Thiers is not permissible to Caesar’s wife. It is good to be a profound expert on Russian literature, like Ivanov-Razumnik: not everyone can dip into the well of the classics and bring up such a present-day image as the fool Yekimovna from The Moor of Peter the Great . 5 From the ava- lanche of Western culture that rushed into old Russia through the window on Europe hacked out by Peter the Great, the fool Yekimovna assimilated only “monsieur-mam’selle-assembly- 5 Prose work by Pushkin. THE STATE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE 26 pardon.” Inevitably, irresistibly, like iron to Magnet Mountain, this image is drawn and clings to our victors. From the French Revolution, from Hertzen, from Marx, they have learned by rote nothing more than “assembly and pardon,” mouthing the words in the accents of Nizhny Novgorod. And this is why there is so much vaudevillian grotesquery in their deeds and in the written monuments they are leaving as a heritage to curious posterity. Saul, converted to the true believer Paul, should stay Paul, if only for the sake of style. And it is not becoming for Paul to utter such heresies as “Can absolutism, whoever may wield it, be compatible with freedom?” (“Two Russias” by Ivanov- Razumnik). However, we shall refrain from comments dangerous to Paul, if only to avoid emulating the bad example of Ivanov-Razumnik, who unhesitatingly declares in the same article in the hearing of “all — all — all,” that Remizov is untrustworthy, Remizov is a White Guard, Remizov is outside the law. But how, indeed, did it happen that Remizov, with his “Tale of the Ruin of the Russian Land,” is now part of the triumphal march of those who sing the glory of the victors? And what is he there for? The explanation is this. Whenever the Roman emperors marched into Rome after a victory over the barbarians, the king of the barbarians was led in the procession behind one of the chariots, and a special crier called out the wealth and power of this king for the greater glory of the victorious emperor. And it was to the same end that Ivanov-Razumnik brought Remizov into the triumphal procession — for the greater glory of the vic- tors. And therefore, after smashing Remizov in the face, Ivanov- Razumnik proclaims: “The Tale of the Ruin of the Russian Land’ is one of the most powerful, most remarkable works writ- ten in our day.” We quite agree with Ivanov-Razumnik’s judgment: Remizov’s “Tale” is a work of great power. But the power lies not in Remi- zov’s usual artistry, but in the shattering sincerity of the work. Remizov’s other works can be admired from this side, from that, from a plank thrown over them: far below, under the plank, the beautiful, clumsy wheels of the mill are turning, the water hums 27 Scythians? and glitters like a rainbow. But the “Tale” cannot be admired from the outside: it draws you in, hand and foot, it whirls and wrings you, so that you reach the last page crushed and ground to bits. “My homeland, my humbled mother. 1 kiss thy wounds, thy parched lips, thy heart, breaking with pain and bitterness, thy slashed, bleeding eyes. I shall not leave thee in thy misfortune, free and captive, free and shackled, holy and sinful, bright and dark. I shall preserve my Russian soul, with faith in thy mar- tyred truth.” What grieving love pulses in every word — love for Russia, always and whatever she may be: holy and sinful, bright and dark! And what a bookish, what a chemical heart one must have not to see that this love and this grief are the soul of Remizov’s “Tale,” and that the wrath and the “bitter hate” rise from this love as smoke from fire. The smoke has blinded Ivanov-Razumnik, he has discerned nothing but the smoke. And out of this smoke he has created an image unknown to us, a dark, distorted image of Remizov — the hater of freedom Remizov — the philistine. Remizov grieves for his humbled mother. And is it not, in- deed, degrading when a Prussian general can throw into the face of the Russian revolution such words as “But where is your free- dom?” Is it not a humiliation when, a day after shouting war- like slogans, the Russian revolution meekly and “immediately” sues the Prussian general for peace? Remizov grieves for his humbled mother. “O my doomed homeland, the royal purple has fallen from thy shoulders. Thou art humbled and trampled.” And the member of the revolutionary tribunal, Ivanov- Razumnik, reads the heart of the defendant Remizov: “When Remizov weeps that the royal purple has fallen from her shoul- ders, we can see that he is grieving not only over the purple of his homeland, but also over the purple of the tsar.” Everything is permitted in the name of speedy action by the revolutionary court, and Ivanov-Razumnik judges Remizov for the words of the Babylonian elders in his “Prayer for Georgiy the Brave.” “The sovereign is gone from the city, every man preys on his neighbor; would that the tsar return speedily,” said the Alexey Remizov 29 Scythians? elders. And the member of the revolutionary tribunal affixes his seal to the verdict: “When we hear this, we know Remizov is fond kin and ally of the Babylonian elders.” To the revolutionary tribunal, the most important thing is that Remizov did not prostrate himself before the victors but dared to discern in them (in them!) the marks of philistinism. With all of his ten volumes, Remizov scourged the philistinism of old Russia, but he must not dare to lash out at the philistinism of the new. Remizov’s eyes are like Gogol’s; he is always quick to see the black. Of what concern is this to the revolutionary tri- bunal? Its verdict is predetermined, and, indeed, how could it be otherwise? After all, it is in Remizov’s “Tale” that we read: We are weary of men’s idleness, of their bragging, of fly- ing, empty words. . . . Greedily, with apish hoots and yowls, they are tearing to pieces the funeral cake baked once upon a time by Russia, who now lies dead. Tearing and gulping and choking. And with bloodshot eyes gnawing the table as a hungry horse gnaws his crib. And rushing to gobble up all there is before the guests arrive. This is something that Remizov will not be forgiven for. What the priest in the purple cassock hates most of all is the heretical, disobedient word. What the priest in the purple cassock hates most of all is the true Scythian, of whom the Scythian preface says: “Is not the Scythian always ready for rebellion?” The true Scythian always is. In Remizov’s “Tale,” permeated through and through with love and grief, Ivanov-Razumnik saw only smoke — bitter hatred. And is it any wonder, when — as we see — the only thing that Ivanov-Razumnik remembers of the whole gospel, of the whole sermon of love, are the words: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Throughout his “Two Russias,” the suddenly warlike Ivanov-Razumnik rattles the sword for the glory of the noble victors, who are so brave with those who are weaker, and so . . . prudent with those who are stronger. And energetically searches for the sound of the sword in Kluyev and Yesenin — the objects of his commendation — even where it does not exist. To the fundamental, the best, the greatest qualities of the Russian soul, to the Russian nobility of spirit, the Russian ten- THE STATE OE RUSSIAN LITERATU RE 30 derness and love for the lowliest human being, the least blade of grass — to all this Ivanov-Razumnik is blind. Yet it is precisely these best qualities of the Russian soul that underlie the un- quenchable Russian longing for peace, for all mankind. Love of the sickle and hate of the sword are the qualities that are most truly Russian, most truly of the people. And this is why the strophes born of these stand out so movingly in the “made-to- order” revolutionary poems of Yesenin and Kluyev. Here are the magnificent closing lines of Yesenin’s “Singing Call”: People, my brothers, Where are you? Answer me! I do not need you, fearless, Bloodthirsty knight. I do not want your victory, I need no tribute! We are all apple trees and cherry trees In a blue orchard. . . . We did not come into the world to destroy, We came to love and to believe. But what the victors and Ivanov-Razumnik need are precisely the “bloodthirsty knight” and the “tribute,” and this is why Ivanov-Razumnik finds that “Singing Call” has a victorious ring. And, of course, what Ivanov-Razumnik will quote is not the above lines, but something “arrogantly Berlinian,” such as: My Russian field, And you, its sons, Who have caught The sun and the moon On your paling. Or: Russia, Russia, Russia — Messiah of the coming day! Truly remarkable is Ivanov-Razumnik’s adventure with Klu- yev’s “Song of the Sun-Bearer”: he not only tolerated this taste- less “Ode to Felice ” 6 in the pages of Skify, but even praised it without blinking an eye. 6 “Ode to Felice” by Derzhavin ( 1782), dedicated to Catherine the Great.- 31 Scythians? China and Europe, North and South Shall gather in the chamber in a round dance of friends, In order to unite the Zenith with the Abyss . . . We have won three acorn suns — Equality and Freedom, and the crown of Brotherhood — A living pasture for ardent hearts . . . The workbench — Nazareth, the anvil — Nimrod. And after that, of course, it is “Arise, ye. . . .” 7 How near this is to Minsky’s famous “Workers of the world, unite” and to Sologub’s “arrogant Berlin,” but how far from our Kluyev — the Kluyev we have known and loved. The capitalized words alone — a tasteless custom introduced, if I am not mistaken, by Andreyev, and the first symptom of creative impotence — would be enough to damn this doggerel. And Kluyev’s “Song of the Sun-Bearer” abounds in such goodies: World, Zenith, Wisdom, Labor, Equal- ity, Song — and Mystery — and that fly-specked old standby, Love — and the Abyss, which has long become as shallow as a puddle. However, Kluyev’s failure is understandable: he is, after all, but a novice in internationalism. In his “Conversational Tune” ( Besedny naigrysh), the same Kluyev wrote with high patriotism about the Germans: The old man called a Hundred Tribes in One Has heard a ringing, as of waters. He looked out from his bed at dawn And saw the enemy hosts. The old man said, “This filthy scum, Like lice on betony, can only be Steamed out in the bath with scalding steam.” In his cycle “Hut Songs,” on the other hand, Kluyev threw away the Swords and Abysses that had been thrust into his hands. And immediately the inspiration is no longer official, but gen- uine. These songs are not tinsel, but pure gold, which will last for centuries without a spot of rust. And here you do not know what to choose, what is better: everything is splendid and alive in Kluyev’s hut: the stove bed, the tom cat, the bellied pot, “the house goblin pattering behind the stove,” the “mother stove” itself, the loaf on the table, “muttering to the knife, ‘I am ready to be sacrificed.’ ” After the “Hut Songs,” it is still more dis- 7 The opening words of “The International.” THE STATE OE RUSSIAN LITERATURE 32 tressing to see Kluyev as the author of odes. The little gray ones may run after the victors like a flock of roosters — God himself has meant them to. But not the Kluyevs: this is not for them. Defeat, martyrdom on the earthly plane — and victory on a higher plane, the plane of ideas. Victory on earth — and inevi- table defeat on the other, higher plane. No third alternative exists for the true Scythian, for the spiritual revolutionary, for the ro- mantic. Eternal reaching out, but never attainment. The eternal wandering of Ahasuerus. The eternal quest for the Fair Lady — who does not exist. And Ivanov-Razumnik knows this, but he is afraid to see the truth. And indeed, just think of it: what if our revolution enters history not with “the fiery face of golden freedom,” but with the face of Remizov’s master workman Semyon Mitrofanovich, who forced his apprentice to kiss his heel? True, a fire is sweep- ing toward us today, and it may erase Semyon Mitrofanovich’s face from the revolution. But Semyon Mitrofanovich does every- thing he can to save himself from the destroying and cleansing flames. And he may save himself, too, he may emerge victorious on earth once more — and so perish, turn philistine still more irrevocably. The lot of the true Scythian is hard to bear. And therefore the weak close their eyes and swim with the current. And there are “hosts, and hosts, and hosts” of them, as Blok exclaims in his poem “The Scythians” ( Znamya truda, no. 137). But are they Scythians? No, they are not. There will be true Scythians, true revolutionaries and freemen under every regime, for they have “a cause — eternal rebellion — under any regime, any external order” (from the introduction to Skify, no. 1). Yes, under any regime. But there will never be “hosts” of them. The divine curse of every true Scythian is to be “a stranger in his own land, not in a strange land” (from “Tale of the Ruin of the Rus- sian Land”). And Ivanov-Razumnik knows all this — he has told us so him- self, and told it well, in his article on “Poets and the Revolution” (Skify, no. 2) : The revolution has come, and who was the first to bow down before it? And should the counterrevolution come, 33 Scythians? who will be first to run, like a “cocky rooster,” after its droshky, carrying the mayor and Khlestakov, under the pro- tection of Derzhimorda ? 8 . . . The great who live in the great will not bow, will not follow. But how many are they? No, there are not many of them. And there can never be “hosts, and hosts, and hosts.” And if they can be counted in hosts, they are not stubborn, freedom-loving Scythians. Free Scythians will not bow to anything. Free Scythians will not run after the victors, after rude force, behind “the mayor and Khle- stakov, under the protection of Derzhimorda,” whatever the color of the mayor’s cockade. 1918 8 The reference is to Gogol’s Inspector General. CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE You come to a mountain. You ascend it. You see the mountain very well: a stone, a shrub, a caterpillar crawling on the shrub. You see everything. And yet, when you are on the mountain, you cannot judge its size or trace its contours. It is only from afar, when you have gone a dozen versts away, when the shrub and the caterpillar and all the details of the mountainside are long out of sight, that you will see the mountain itself. The grandiose events of recent years — the World War, the Russian Revolution — are much like the mountain. For the time being, we see only the shrub, the caterpillar, the stone; we’ll see the mountain only when we are ten years away from it. And only then can genuine literature about the war and the revolu- tion begin to appear. The attempts of our writers to speak about this today are wasted labor (one-sided in one way or another). The contemporary inevitably finds himself in the position of the petty officer’s wife who cursed Napoleon in 1812 for no other reason but that her excellent cow had been hit by a stray bullet during the Battle of Borodino. This is why, when I discuss the newest Russian literature with you, I shall not touch upon the very latest writers — I shall by- pass attempts at an immediate response to the roar of the storm outside the walls. Such attempts will become part of the history of the revolution, but not the history of literature. In order to approach what I call the newest Russian literature, This was a public lecture delivered at the People’s University in Lebedyan, one of the many adult education schools which sprang up in Russia after the revolution. 34