Translator’s introduction
We played a fateful role in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s life. An epitome of his philosophy, the novel prefigured his own future and that of his country with astonishing accuracy. Zamyatin’s credo is best expressed in the words of the heroine of We: “There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite,” and, “I do not want anyone to want for me—I want to want for myself.”
These two principles—eternal change, and freedom of the individual to choose, to want, to create according to his own need and his own will-dominated both his life and his work. “We shall break down all walls—to let the green wind blow free from end to end—across the earth,” says his heroine. Small wonder he was hated and hounded by those who demanded uniformity and total compliance with an outside will—the state’s, the Benefactor’s, the Party’s.
A powerful and original writer, and an entirely modern one, Zamyatin is deeply rooted in the traditions of Russian literature. He is a direct descendant of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, the favorites of his childhood. He is also close kin to Leskov, Chekhov, Shchedrin, and his own contemporaries Alexey Remizov and Audrey Bely. Like Gogol and Dostoyevsky, he is profoundly concerned with central moral problems; like all of them, he is a great master of satire, style, and the grotesque.
Zamyatin was born in 1884 in Lebedyan, one of the most colorful towns in the heart of die Russian black-earth belt, some two hundred miles southeast of Moscow—a region of fertile fields, of ancient churches and monasteries, of country fairs, gypsies and swindlers, nuns and innkeepers, buxom Russian beauties, and merchants who made and lost millions overnight. It was also a region that preserved a richly expressive folk speech, which Zamyatin absorbed and later used to magnificent effect in many of his stories, plays, and novellas.
His father, an Orthodox priest, taught religion at the local school. His mother was a talented pianist.
A naval engineer by training, Zamyatin early turned to literature. In 1913 he published the novella “A Provincial Tale,” and in 1914 “At the World’s End,” satirizing army life in a remote garrison town. The journal in which the latter appeared was confiscated by the Tsarist authorities, and both the editor and the author were brought to trial for “maligning the Russian officer corps.” The charges were dismissed, but this was only one of Zamyatin’s lifelong clashes with constituted authority.
As a student at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute during the early years of the century, Zamyatin had joined the Bolshevik faction of the Social-Democratic Party. Arrested during the revolution of 1905, he spent some months in solitary confinement and on his release was exiled from St. Petersburg. After a short stay in Lebedyan, he came back to the capital, where he lived “illegally” (and even continued his schooling) until 1911, when the police finally caught up with him and exiled him a second time. It was during this exile that he wrote “A Provincial Tale.” In 1913 he was amnestied and permitted to reside in St. Petersburg.
On graduation from the Polytechnic Institute, he was invited to serve on its faculty. For some years literature was largely superseded by teaching and engineering work. During World War I, Zamyatin was sent to England to design and supervise the construction of some of the earliest Russian icebreakers. When the Revolution of 1917 broke out, he could not endure to be away from Russia and hastened back, bringing with him two tales satirizing English life, “The Islanders” and “The Fisher of Men.”
In Russia, Zamyatin (no longer a Bolshevik) threw himself with tremendous energy into the great cultural and artistic upsurge that followed the revolution. This was a period of fantastic contradictions. Russia lay in ruins after years of war, revolution, and continuing civil strife. Her economic life had all but wholly broken down. Transportation, communication, the food supply, the contact between city and village were in total disarray. Yet in the midst of hunger and cold, a band of dedicated spirits took it upon themselves not only to save the country’s culture but to present to the hitherto deprived masses the cultural heritage of the entire world.
Initiated chiefly by Gorky, the veritable patron saint of Russian literature in those grim days, a number of organizations were formed, both to keep writers, scholars, and artists physically alive and to permit them to continue their work. In Petersburg, these included the House of the Arts, established in 1920 in the unheated former palace of the great merchant Yeliseyev, where writers were given lodgings in every available room and cubbyhole; the House of Scientists; and a number of publishing houses and literary journals (Zam-yatin served on the editorial boards of several of these). Studios were organized where young writers were taught the elements of their craft by such writers, poets, and translators as Zamyatin, Gumilyov, Lozinsky, Chukovsky, and others. Both teachers and students often had to cross die frozen city on foot and sit, in unheated rooms, dressed in old coats, sweaters, mufflers, chilled and hungry but totally absorbed in the brilliant discussions of literature.
A variety of schools and movements proliferated in all the arts, some of them continuing with renewed vigor from prewar days, others entirely new. Endless disputes raged between symbolists, futurists, constructivists, formalists, acmeists, imag-inists, neo-realists, and, of course, the increasingly powerful and vocal groups of proletarian writers and critics who regarded literature as the mere instrument of the revolution and social change. Zamyatin became the leader and teacher of the Serapion Brethren, a group that included some of the most promising and original young writers of the time—Mikhail Zoshchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, Valentin Katayev, Veniamin Kaverin, Konstantin Fedin, Lev Lunts, Nikolay Tikhonov, Victor Shklovsky, and others. Differing in temperament, method, and scope, they were united in their insistence on creative freedom, on the artist’s right to pursue his own individual vision, on variety, experimentation in form, and the importance of craft.
Lev Lunts, one of the most brilliant members of the group, formulated a manifesto in which he proclaimed the complete autonomy of art “Literary chimeras,” he wrote, “are a special form of reality.” He rejected those on both the right and the left who cried, “If you are not with us, you are against us.” “With whom are we, the Serapion Brethren?” he asked. “We are with the hermit Serapion… We reject utilitarianism. We do not write for the sake of propaganda. Art is as real as life itself, and, as life itself, it has no goal or meaning, it exists because it must exist… Our one demand is that the writer’s voice must never be false.”
The Serapions rallied round Zamyatin’s credo that “true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics, “—a credo he proclaimed in 1921, in his essay “I Am Afraid.”[6] And the need for heresy, the right to say “no” to official dogma, the belief that mistakes are more useful than truths, that truths are ideas “already afflicted with arteriosclerosis” are urged again and again in Zamyatin’s writings. In “Tomorrow” he wrote:
He who has found his ideal today is like Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt… The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy… We call the Russian intelligentsia to the defense of man, and of human values. We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow—and judge today in the name of tomorrow, in the name of man.
6
This essay, as well as the others quoted here, may be found in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago University Press, 1970).