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.
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.
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).