In 1921, in an essay entitled “Paradise,” Zamyatin again lashed out scathingly at the purveyors of unanimity, at those who pressed for total conformity:
Much has been said by many about the imperfection of the universe… its astonishing lack of monism: water and fire, mountains and abysses, saints and sinners. What absolute simplicity, what happiness, unclouded by any thought, there would have been if [God] had from the very first created a single firewater, if he had from the very first spared man the savage state of freedom!… We are unquestionably living in a cosmic era—an era of creation of a new heaven and a new earth. And naturally we will not repeat [His] mistake. There shall be no more polyphony or dissonances. There shall be only majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unanimity.
In “The New Russian Prose” (1923) he wrote:
Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of Revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.
And in his essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters,” he developed further one of the central ideas of We:
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 immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law—like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)…
In the same essay he wrote:
Harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means of combating calcification… It is Utopian, absurd… It is right 150 years later.
And, one of his most significant statements:
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?”
In 1926, in “The Goal,” Zamyatin made a frontal attack on the Communist critics who demanded of the writer total subservience to the demands of the party:
The Revolution does not need dogs who “sit up” in expectation of a handout or because they fear the whip. Nor does it need trainers of such dogs. It needs writers who fear nothing… It needs writers in whom the Revolution awakens a true organic echo. And it does not matter if this echo is individual… if a writer ignores such-and-such a paragraph adopted at such-and-such a conference. What matters is that his work be sincere, that it lead the reader forward… that it disturb the reader rather than reassure and lull his mind… But where forward? And how far forward? The farther the better… Reduction of prices, better sanitation in the cities… all this is very good… I can imagine an excellent newspaper article on these topics (an article that will be forgotten the next day). But I find it difficult to imagine a wort by Lev Tolstoy or Remain Rolland based on improvement of sanitation.
Inevitably, Zamyatin became one of the prime victims of the purveyors of “unanimity” and “sanitary” literature. He was attacked for “inconsonance with the revolution,” for “vilification and slander” of revolutionary tenets and “achievements,” for being “a cold and hostile observer” and an “internal emigre’” who played into the hands of the enemies of the Soviet regime. (It is scarcely necessary to point here to the long list of independent artists—Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and others—who have suffered similar treatment at the hands of the dictatorship.)
During the first post-revolutionary decade it was still possible for Zamyatin to publish his works, despite the constant chorus of abuse from the guardians of orthodoxy. His works, naturally, never appeared in the officially sponsored and subsidized magazines. They were usually published in fairly short-lived journals or anthologies issued by writers’ groups, or by the few private journals and publishing houses that were still allowed to exist in those early years.
With great courage and integrity, Zamyatin continued to write as he saw and felt—essays, plays, fiction—although the dead hand of the dictatorship was steadily becoming heavier. A striking light on an important facet of his character is thrown by a passage from an essay “On the Future of the Theater,” written considerably later and published in French in 1932. “The most serious play,” he wrote, “is the play with fate which carries in its pocket a timetable, drawn up and stamped a long time ago, and marking the day and hour of the tragic end of every one of us.” Unquestionably, he knew what was to come, but went on doing what he felt he must do.
The scope and quality of his writing, under the circumstances, are astonishing. Zamyatin was not only a consummate satirist and stylist, but a master of many themes and many styles. Some of his stories[7] are marvelous evocations of the almost mythical old Russia of his childhood. Some read like ballads—the landscape is stark, the people and events tragic or comic on a grand scale. Still others deal with the present, often drawn in a grotesque, oblique, surrealist light, with echoing images and an extraordinary mingling of reality and irreality, mockery and grief. Others are jests, ribald inventions he called “impious tales.” In addition to his other qualities, Zamyatin had an unexpected streak of irrepressible gaiety and a great sense of fun.
The same richness and diversity and a keen eye for the comic and grotesque infuse his plays. Many of his characters are marvelous caricatures. Wit, imagination, and, always, most meticulous craftsmanship are combined in much of his work with a profound sense of history and a prophetic vision. This is particularly true of We, a searing satire, among other things, on schematic—hence, necessarily, totalitarian—society, written in 1920-1921. We was not admitted to publication. Read, as the custom frequently was in those years, at a meeting of the All-Russian Writers’ Union in 1923, it elicited a new wave of violent attacks from party-line critics and writers.
Zamyatin wrote this remarkably prophetic novel when the totalitarian future was just becoming discernible. Like all great satirists, he projected from present trends and intimations to an encompassing vision of the society to come. His method, as he defined it in We, was reductio ad finem—a. method later applied with powerful effect by such master satirists as William Golding (The Inheritors, Lord of the Flies) and Anthony Burgess (The Wanting Seed, A Clockwork Orange).
Poet, mocker (laughter, he wrote, is the most devastating weapon), heretical fighter for freedom and independence in art and in life, Zamyatin was a consistent enemy of all canonized ideas, all coercion, all the purveyors of “compulsory salvation.” He mercilessly attacked and ridiculed the emerging totalitarianism, its fawning mediocrities, its reign of brutality, its violation and destruction of the free and creative human spirit He foresaw it alclass="underline" the terror, the betrayals, the dehumanization; the ubiquitous “guardians”; the control of thought and action; the constant brainwashing which resulted either in unquestioning automatons or in hypocrites who lied for the sake of survival; the demand that everybody worship the Benefactor, with his huge hand that literally “liquidates,” reduces all who dissent, all who passionately want to be themselves to a puddle of clear water. He also foresaw the subjection of the arts. His hero boasts: “We have harnessed the once wild element of poetry. Today, poetry is no longer the idle, impudent whistling of a nightingale; poetry is civic service, poetry is useful.” And not only must the people (“numbers”) in this apocalyptic state of ritualized totalitarianism attend the gala ceremony of extermination of every heretic by the Benefactor, but a poet is obliged to recite an ode celebrating the wisdom and great justice of the executioner.