Three by Zamyatin
Zamyatin, Yevgeny & Ginsburg, Mirra
A NOTE ON ZAMYATIN In 1924, in an autobiographical sketch, Yevgeny Zamyatin (18841937) wrote of his student days, `I was a Bolshevik then (today I am not)." In 1914 Tsarist authorities...
...M his work be sincere, that it lead the reader forward instead of back, that it disturb the reader rather than reassure and lull his mind...
...Back in the era of Serafino, one who considered himself the greatest of poets wrote: "Were I not fearful of disturbing the air of your modesty with a golden cloud of honors, I could not have refrained from decking the windows of the edifice of fame with the bright vestments with which the hands of praise adorn the backs of names that are the portion of superior beings" (Letter from Pietro Aretino to the Duchess of Urbino...
...Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow...
...Otherwise— to live as a student did five years ago on his forty rubles—Gogol would have to write four Inspector Generals a month, Turgenev would have to turn out three Fathers and Sons every two months, and Chekhov would have to produce a hundred stories every month...
...true, it is an age of wars and rebellions...
...Edicts, resolutions, paragraphs: trees—and no wood behind the trees...
...With small exceptions (such as Mikhail Volkov of the Moscow "Smithy"), all the practitioners of proletarian culture have the most revolutionary content and the most reactionary form...
...Major surgery" conducts the THREE BY ZAMYATIN experiments of Carrel and Voronoff...
...the thesis...
...EVERY TODAY is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow...
...it is, naturally, a movement forward...
...Reduction of prices, better sanitation in the cities, tractorization of the village—all this is very good...
...Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man...
...Throughout the 1920s Communist writers and critics hounded Zamyatin for his refusal to conform to their notion of the duties of an artist in revolutionary society...
...With the word, the Russian intelligentsia and Russian literature have fought for decades for the great human tomorrow...
...It is time to understand that literature, like science, is divided into major and minor branches, each with its own tasks...
...But, then, why not...
...It needs writers who do not seek immediate benefits—just as the Revolution does not seek immediate benefits (it is not by chance that it teaches us to sacrifice everything, even life, for the sake of the happiness of future generations: this is its ethic...
...The nimblest of all were the Futurists...
...In the late 1920s, when the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) became virtual dictator of Soviet literature and proceeded to establish a monopoly of party-dominated art, Zamyatin was one of the principal targets of attack...
...I am afraid that we shall have no genuine literature until we cease to regard the Russian demos as a child whose innocence must be protected...
...the court is no longer here...
...In 1914 Tsarist authorities suppressed Zamyatin's novella At the World's End, which satirized the life of a provincial army post, and brought him to trial on charges of maligning the Russian officer corps...
...the name of the sickness that afflicts Russian literature is malenursism...
...The writer often collapses under the burden of work that is alien to him...
...To the genuine writer or poet the choice is clear...
...The difference is that the present ruling class knows (should know, I feel) all this...
...To them, a writer is merely a mutt who must be taught to stand on his hind legs— then he is given a morsel of meat, and everything is just fine...
...Nothing...
...The date of "The Goal" is uncertain, but internal evidence points to the mid-1920s...
...Edison, too, perfected Bell's invention...
...The work of a literary artist, who "embodies his ideas in bronze" with pain and joy, and the work of a prolific windbag—the work of Chekhov and that of Breshko-Breshkovsky—are today appraised in the same way: by the yard, by the sheet...
...It is impossible to be silent any longer...
...Take these gilded chairs— the exquisite gilded chairs in their grace and yes, surely, they must be preserved: they tenderness...
...True genius creates thoughtfully and embodies its ideas in bronze, but mediocrity, hiding under the aegis of freedom, snatches a fleeting triumph in its name and plucks the flowers of ephemeral success...
...We march in the name of tomorrow's free man—the royal man...
...1926...
...Futurism disappeared...
...The writer who cannot be nimble must trudge to an office with a briefcase if he wants to stay alive...
...The Imaginist America, alas, has been discovered long before...
...This dictum might waken the enthusiasm of a fascist, an imperialist, but not a revolutionary, not a dialectician...
...We must preserve our publishing houses," wrote the Literary Gazette, "but not for the Zamyatins...
...Fortunately, the masses have a keener nose than they are given credit for...
...But I find it difficult to imagine a work by Lev Tolstoy or Romain Rolland based on improvement of sanitation...
...they know when it is time to don the red cap, and when to discard it...
...Perhaps he is needed only as a teacher of "poetic science...
...But we offer the writings of these "nimble authors, who know when to don the red cap, and when to discard it," when to sing hail to the tsar, and when to the hammer and sickle—we offer them to the people as a literature worthy of the revolution...
...I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color .. . I raised this problem in one of my articles (published in the journal Dom iskusstv...
...It is time to cry out: man is brother to man...
...Barely noticed, the "Scythians" rushed, long ago, down the dark, trolleyless streets...
...But this is why a respite from hatred is all the more necessary—for hatred has a destructive effect upon the human psyche...
...But it must not be forgotten that the Athenian agora, the Athenian people, knew how to listen to more than odes...
...This can please only such typical products of the transitional period, entirely devoid of a sense of smell, as Gorbachev or Lelevich...
...The retrospection is correct...
...minor surgery" bandages a sprained arm...
...wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation...
...minor surgery" fulfills daily, current needs...
...The essay published in Dom iskusstv, which appeared in January 1921, is "I am Afraid...
...Because his thought always rose above the specifics of the moment, they speak as validly and pertinently today as they did at the time they were written...
...The brutal Middle Ages are returning, the value of human life is falling precipitously, a new wave of European pogroms is rolling on...
...If we compel Carrel to bandage sprains, we shall obtain one more male nurse...
...No, my dearest comrades, it is not just fine...
...of course, this would be useful, but stupid, for in gaining a male nurse, humanity would lose a scientific genius...
...Mercilessly vilified, he was denied all access to publication—unless, like most of his less courageous colleagues, he recanted his sins...
...It does not matter if a writer ignores such-and-such a paragraph adopted at suchandsuch a conference...
...He struck out at what he regarded as the subversion of the revolution's goals...
...the cart pulls the horse...
...And for a year we heard nothing but their yellow, green, and raspberry red triumphant cries...
...And it does not matter if this echo is individual in every writer...
...From the jungle he has come out upon the well-trodden highway...
...Yet this is precisely what is being lost sight of...
...Zamyatin's program at all times was "In Defense of Man...
...it had no fear of the harsh scourge of Aristophanes either...
...And the literary centaurs rush, kicking and crushing one another, in a race for the splendid prize—the monopoly on the scribbling of odes, the monopoly on the knightly pursuit of slinging mud at the intelligentsia...
...But even this is not the main thing...
...And today it is time to raise this weapon once again...
...Hertzen would lecture to the sailors of the Baltic fleet...
...Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is inevitably heresy to today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust...
...And the nonnimble are silent...
...these are realistic figures...
...It needs writers in whom the Revolution awakens a true, organic echo...
...It was never published in Soviet Russia and first appeared in Russian in Litsa, a collection of Zamyatin's essays published by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York in 1955...
...But even this magnificent beacon is still burning with the old reserves of his "I" and "Simple as Lowing...
...They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons...
...we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses...
...in a form that many people found sharp and offensive, and this served as a signal for the launching of a newspaper and magazine campaign against me...
...I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment...
...For the moment, we give no thought to fostering the high emotions which belong to an era when collectivism is being realized...
...With this contemptuous decree, the French Revolution guillotined the masquerading court poets...
...I can imagine an excellent newspaper article on these topics (an article that will be forgotten the next day...
...And I am afraid that the airplanes from among the nimble will always outstrip the honest locomotives and, "hiding under the aegis of freedom," will snatch a fleeting triumph in its name...
...The hands of praise," "the backs of names" —isn't this Imaginism...
...Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far...
...And as before, a single beacon rises amid the tin-flat Futurist seaMayakovsky...
...tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual—in the name of man...
...we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow —and judge today in the name of tomorrow, in the name of man...
...the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers...
...No one can be carried away by it...
...The germ of the future is always in the present...
...What matters is that 1 G. E. Gorbachev (1897-1942), G. Lelevich (1901-45) and L. L. Averbakh (1903...
...And it may, too much of what we have inherited from perhaps, be true that court poets resemble the palaces...
...Yesterday...
...And even this brief measure of success was apparently denied to Gorodetsky: at the evening in the Duma hall he had a cool reception, and his own evening at the House of the Arts was attended by fewer than ten people...
...He disappeared during the Great Purge in the 1930s...
...Yes, this is one of the reasons for the silence of true literature...
...In the "Heroes and Victims of the Revolution," in "Doughnuts" and the poem about the peasant woman and Wrangel, it is no longer the same Mayakovsky, the Edison, the pioneer whose every step was hacked out in the jungle...
...This campaign has continued, on different pretexts, to this day...
...Frequently of late the author has asked himself whether anyone needs him— that is, whether anyone needs Petersburg or 1 Series of anthologies of the Symbolist group, published by the Alkonost publishing house in 1919 22...
...To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving...
...He challenged every dictum by which the rulers sought to consolidate and justify the total dominance of what, in his novel We, he prophetically called "the Single State...
...In art, the surest way to destroy," he wrote in "The New Russian Prose" in 1924, "is to canonize one given form and one philosophy...
...A NOTE ON ZAMYATIN In 1924, in an autobiographical sketch, Yevgeny Zamyatin (18841937) wrote of his student days, `I was a Bolshevik then (today I am not...
...The Proletcult art is, thus far, a step back, to the 1860s...
...Thus, the fleeting triumph of the Futurists, and the equally fleeting triumph of Kluyev, after his patriotic verses about the base Wilhelm and his enthusiasm over the "rebuff in decrees" and the machine gun (a ravishing rhyme: machine-gunning and honey...
...From my (heretical) point of view, THREE BY ZAMYATIN a stubborn, unyielding enemy is far more deserving of respect than a sudden convert to communism—such as Sergey Gorodetsky, to take one example...
...Tomorrow" appeared in a collection In Defense of Man, published in Petersburg in 1919...
...Without a moment's pause, they proclaimed themselves the court school...
...And in them, we hear Andrey Bely complaining: The conditions under which we live are tearing us to pieces...
...We feel that the correct answer to these questions should be: the farther the better, the more valuable...
...The Revolution does not need dogs who "sit up" in expectation of a handout or because they fear the whip...
...And the grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers...
...I am afraid that we are too kind, and that the French Revolution was more ruthless in destroying everything connected with the court...
...In the answer to these questions we find the basic error of the majority of today's critics and the majority of writers who are obediently following critics incapable of thinking dialectically...
...The three essays that follow * are eloquent examples of Zamyatin's "inconvenient habit" of fearlessly speaking his mind...
...And I am afraid that, if this continues, the entire recent period in Russian literature will become known in history as the age of the nimble school, for those who are not nimble have been silent now for the past two years...
...It is not possible to build on negative emotions...
...What can excite the imagination in "The ABC of Politics...
...The proletarian writers and poets are diligently trying to be aviators astride a loco THREE BY ZAMYATIN motive...
...A society planning to rebuild life on different, new, nobler foundations can no more accept this shameful law than it can accept without objection the sale of their bodies by women...
...Dairy cooperation—when it is the concern of a specialist, not Averbakh—is a most estimable matter...
...His tools were satire and dissent...
...In an increasingly monolithic state based on rigid and inviolate dogma, he dared to preach continual change and the relativity of all truths...
...It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters...
...There were not many who saw so clearly and spoke so strongly in warning against the onrushing dark age...
...The purpose of art, including literature, is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it...
...Writer, critic, playwright, editor, teacher, and one of the most articulate spokesmen for heresy, he was too dangerous to be tolerated...
...Man is forgotten, for the sake of the sabbath...
...But is it not a mistake to preare so graceful, they embrace so tenderly serve the institution of court poets with as 0 THREE BY ZAMYATIN much solicitude as we preserve the gilded chairs...
...1921 ALL OF OUR LITERATURE is still permeated by the poisons of war...
...It is true that artists of every kind—the majority of artists—have always been unprincipled and corrupted by skepticism...
...Last year's Zapiski mechtateley [Notes of dreamers], 1 published by Alkonost, are but a dim solitary glimmer in the dark yesterday...
...tomorrow there will be only tsars...
...Turgenev would undoubtedly be translating Balzac and Flaubert for World Literature...
...In our day, Gogol would be running with a briefcase to the Theater Section...
...She made a single mistake: this is not one of the reasons, but the only reason to which, broadly speaking, all the others reduce themselves...
...But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox, when he must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at everyone, like Swift, or smile at every THREE BY ZAMYATIN thing, like Anatole France, there can be no bronze literature, there can be only a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today, and used for wrapping soap tomorrow...
...The locomotive huffs and puffs sincerely and assiduously, but it does not look as if it can rise aloft...
...Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow...
...No wonder Marietta Shaginyan (whom all the Gorbachevs have recently invested with the formal title of "Left Fellow Traveler") lost patience and cried out in her book, Daily Life and Art, that one of the reasons why "the writer is sick" is lack of "projections of the future...
...Averbakh understands it thus: "Dairy coopera tion in a peasant country is a matter of enormous importance...
...The only weapon worthy of man—of tomorrow's man—is the word...
...They deal with one of his major concerns—the role of the artist in society...
...And therefore, the triumph of the nimble is only momentary...
...The proud Homo erectus is dropping to all fours, is growing fangs and fur...
...The "horsism" of the Moscow Imaginists is too obviously weighed down by the castiron shadow of Mayakovsky...
...But where forward...
...In 1931 Zamyatin wrote his famous letter to Stalin, asking to be allowed to leave Russia, "with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist...
...I am afraid that we shall have no genuine literature until we cure ourselves of this new brand of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word...
...It may be a tiny step, to be measured perhaps in centimeters, but a step, nevertheless, to a given future—one of a million means toward the attainment of our goal...
...After all, only the palaces remain...
...It needs writers who fear nothing—just as the Revolution fears nothing...
...and Chekhov would be working for the Commissariat of Public Health...
...This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity...
...Basically, their criticism reduces itself to the command: "Sit up and beg...
...We call the Russian intelligentsia to the defense of man, and of human values...
...I find it difficult to imagine readers truly, deeply moved by such a sanitary Tolstoy...
...today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain...
...For the task of reflecting life there is a minor art—photography...
...He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned into a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead...
...Blok's "Twelve" struck two years ago—and after the last, twelfth stroke, Blok fell silent...
...And how far forward...
...And if this sickness is incurable, then I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past...
...the beast takes ascendancy in man...
...the reason is far weightier, far tougher, far more ironclad...
...An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers...
...But this law of buying and selling talent is a law of capitalist society...
...It is built on hatred—on class hatred, its components, its surrogates...
...He sang the revolution when others, sitting in Petersburg, were firing their longrange verses at Berlin...
...As a result, they merely corrupt and degrade art...
...An excellent and pungent means—the image—has become an end in itself...
...It is time, at last, to understand that the stubborn limitation of writers to the area of "minor affairs" creates only a philistine, subservient literature, and nothing more...
...Our criticism is pushing Russian literature today into the role of male nurse...
...The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy...
...today, the antithesis...
...Art has always served the ruling classes...
...True, our age is a cruel, iron age...
...This sounds like a preposterous joke, but unfortunately it is not a joke...
...But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized, dairy-cooperative pathos is ridiculous...
...There is a firm division of surgery into "major" and "minor...
...Today is doomed to die—because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born...
...1919-20 I AM AFRAID that we preserve too fondly any rear end deposited in them...
...Because he is not one of the nimble...
...Those who are trying to build a new culture in our extraordinary time often turn their eyes to the distant past—to the stadium, the theater, the games of the Athenian demos...
...For months, he has no opportunity to concentrate and finish an uncompleted phrase...
...In the face of growing repression he insisted on intellectual and artistic freedom...
...they know the fashion and color of the given season...
...the later recommends methods of determining a ship's position at sea...
...Mm1A GINSBURG * From the forthcoming book, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, to be published by theUniversity of Chicago Press...
...Copyright © 1970 by The University of Chicago...
...Such is the wise and cruel law...
...If so, he would immediately put down his pen and try to find a job as a street cleaner, rather than violate his soul by surrogates of literary activity...
...What does it mean for literature to "organize life...
...We want to recall something else to mind: that the sabbath is for man...
...Yet, what our future will be depends on us...
...Major surgery" carries science forward...
...Russian writers are accustomed to going hungry...
...The entire difference in the nature of the present ruling class is that it rules temporarily, that it rules in order to cease ruling as soon as possible —in order to free mankind of the yoke of any state and any rule...
...A revolutionary should be nauseated by such "service," which quite naturally degenerates into a lackey's servility...
...The spectacle of service to the ruling class based on the advantages accruing from such service should certainly provoke no jubilation in a revolutionary...
...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...
...No matter how they exert themselves to smell bad and to shout, they will not outsmell and outshout Mayakovsky...
...he has dedicated himself to perfecting official themes and rhythms...
...Dairy cooperation will be the topic of the works of new writers, because it is a matter of the social experience of the new epoch...
...This sounds like a malicious anecdote, but this malicious anecdote, mocking Averbakh, was invented—for the edification of posterity—by Averbakh himself...
...What comes after the abolition of classes is not a time of automatic equality, of sheer animal well-being, but a time of enormous upsurge of the highest human emotions, a time of love...
...We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses...
...The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony—the cathode and anode in literature...
...Astronomy is divided into major and minor: the former seeks to determine the course of the solar system...
...were Communist critics who demanded strict control of literature and total subservience of art to the aims of the party...
...The majority of them have always been lanceknights, mercenaries who sold themselves to the highest bidder...
...And the writer faces the choice: either he becomes a Breshko-Breshkovsky or he is silent...
...And we—how far we are from Aristophanes when even the utterly innocuous Toiler of Wordstreams by Gorky is withdrawn from the repertory to shield that foolish infant, the Russian demos, from temptation...
...I am afraid Payan was right—this merely corrupts and degrades art...
...As head of the RAPP, Averbakh was virtual dictator of Soviet literature from 1929 to 1932, subjecting nonconformist writers to vicious persecution...
...Nor does it need trainers of such dogs...
...Man is dying...
...The main reason for their silence is not lack of bread or lack of paper...
...It is 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...
...Wars, imperialist and civil, have turned man into material for warfare, into a number, a cipher...
...On the eleventh day of Messidor, in 1794, Payan, chairman of the Commission on Public Education, issued a decree, which stated, among other things: We have a multitude of nimble authors, who keep a constant eye on the latest trend...
...and, perhaps, men like Averbakh, who are not very far removed from them.' What these young men have in their hands is not pen and ink, but a whip and a piece of roast beef...
...Yesterday there was a tsar, and there were slaves...
...In this letter Zamyatin wrote: "1 know that among the works I wrote during the first three or four years after the Revolution there were some that might provide a pretext for attacks...
...How ever, the combination of the red sansculotte cap with the yellow blouse and yesterday's still visible blue flower on the cheek proved too blasphemously glaring even for the least demanding...
...The Futurists were politely shown the door by those in whose name these self-appointed heralds galloped...
...The Silver Dove...
...and tomorrow, the synthesis...
...And what was contributed to literature by those who were not silent...
Vol. 17 • January 1970 • No. 1
