A Free Imagination

...In a sense, his career may be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between the sophisticated and vibrant pre-Revo-lutionary culture and the new proletarian order...

...Although highly original, a number of his tales are only tentative experiments...

...It was a period of experimentation and innovation which, following the usual Russian pattern, was most deeply felt in literature...

...But in the boiler room where Trofim Ivanovich worked the boiler hummed as usual, and the manometer indicated the same nine atmospheres...

...Verbal experiments in rhythmic and highly stylized prose, an interest in city slang and regional dialects, startling and unusual imagery, fantasy and the grotesque increasingly penetrated fiction...

...He prays, receives understanding, and then leads the maid to Erasmus with the words, "For I see now: he who depicts creation must know all the mysteries of the Creator...

...We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy...

...Russian literature was moving away from the high seriousness that had been the source of much of its greatness as well as its biggest pitfall...

...They're deep...

...Erasmus, a novice in a monastery, wants to paint an icon of the passionate life of St...

...In the West he has achieved a modicum of fame for his satiric anti-Utopian novel, We (a source, incidentally, of Orwell's 1984...

...Nevertheless, he is invariably interesting and there is much here of intrinsic merit...

...He died in Paris in 1937...

...Right to the root of things...

...Of the Petersburg stories, The Cave is a compelling picture of a middle-class couple who are unable to withstand the terrible privations of a winter during the years of Revolution and Civil War...

...It deals with a barren woman's quest for fertility...

...Gogol had an incredible ear for the rich resources of his Russian language, and his capacity to manipulate them gave coherence to his prolific imagination...

...at times, device and strategem obscure his essential vision...

...The Saint comes to him in a vision and offers herself to the novice...

...Bring up Russian literature at an informal gathering and you are still bound to hear something like: "Yes, those Russians...

...It is complex and symbolic, like almost all of Zamyatin's stories, but free of the excessive structural complications and mannerisms that mar some of his earlier work...

...He left his traces on the realistic novel, but it largely absorbed him as it moved toward a more neutral, less expressive style consistent with its very different interests...

...If they do not comprehend the nightmare of history, they at all events resist it...

...Zamyatin's writing may move in too many directions at once...

...The 19th century considered Gogol the father of the realistic novel, and that view continues to be maintained with unwavering fidelity in the Soviet Union...

...North and In Old Russia are beautiful, lyrical evocations of that same provincial Russia which Zamyatin elsewhere treats satirically...

...Throughout the '20s he proved an indefatigable polemicist for a free and uncontrolled literature...

...The Flood remains, in my opinion, Zamyatin's masterpiece...

...A Story About The Most Important Thing exhibits Zamyatin's greatest weakness—his occasional penchant for allegorizing...

...Gogol found a gifted follower in Nikolai Leskov, a brilliant and imaginative writer who kept himself aloof from the mainstream of the Russian novel and therefore is little known in the West, though he is perhaps the most widely read 19th century novelist and short-story writer in the Soviet Union today...

...His own work and life stand as a testament to the free imagination...

...It is located in the semi-barbaric, primitive backwaters of Russia—a landscape that seldom protruded into the largely genteel tradition of Russian letters—and provides a chilling portrait of the gradual hardening of an authoritarian mind...

...A Provincial Tale, his first published work and the opening story in the collection, might be the title of a good half of the stories...

...The same atmosphere pervades The Flood, the last story Zamyatin was to write in Russia: "Around Vasi-lievsky Island the world lay spread out like a distant sea: out in the world there had been a war, then a revolution...

...Sterility versus fertility, sexual freedom versus frigidity are in various guises Zamyatin's most frequent concern...

...He began writing in those turbulent, creatively productive prewar years and grew to maturity in the first decade of the Soviet era...

...Mirra Ginsburg has done us a service with her translation and editing of a representative body of Zamyatin's prose...

...We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake...

...Yet, The Healing Of The Novice Erasmus is a fable of poetic beauty and truth...

...From its very beginnings, Russian fiction has known a strong current that runs counter to the dominant assumptions of the Russian novel with its abiding interest in social and political problems, depth psychology, and those "eternal questions" in Ivan Karamazov's memorable phrase...

...Zamyatin had the misfortune to live in a state that took upon itself the prerogatives to decide which mysteries the artist might and might not know...

...And if you are especially unlucky someone may mention that everlasting "dark, brooding Russian soul...

...His tales and plays are highly complex improvisations in which caricature obliterates any sense of character, incident erupts without causality, and the comic, the fantastic and an exuberant lyricism are deftly blended...

...Mary of Egypt...

...He cannot manage it, though, because he has never known a woman's body...

...There are several light, farcical stories in the collection and a number of fables...

...The real force of Gogol's influence was not felt, however, until the birth of Russian modernism at the end of the century...

...The lives of Zamyatin's characters are incrusted in habits of violence, foolishness and, sometimes, despair...

...Reviewed by MILTON EHRE There has always existed in the West a tendency to identify Russian literature almost exclusively with the novel, particularly the novel of social and psychological analysis...

...It was returning to the root of all art—free and imaginative play...

...Zamyatin has not yet been "rehabilitated," and it is doubtful that he is at all known to the younger generation of Russians...

...A brilliant and gifted writer in his own right, he was also a teacher and a sort of elder statesman of a talented group of young Soviet writers who had sprung up in those few relatively free years after the Revolution...

...In truth, Gogol was anything but a master of the psychological and social novel...

...As Timosha in A Provincial Tale reflects: "N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us...

...He was a genius of the grotesque...

...He lost his polemic, of course, was hounded out of literature in 1929, and finally, in 1931, out of his country...

...This was the period that gave us Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Chagall, Stanislavsky and Meyer-hold, to mention only a few familiar names...

...But We, I think, is inferior to and inconsistent with the bulk of Zamyatin's work...

...And on the surface, way above-why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing...

...The Elder of the monastery sees it as the work of the Devil and not of God...

...There are moments of release, of freedom, but his people are essentially outside of history...

...Throughout his career Zamyatin's true domain remained that of the brutish, the ignorant, the semiconscious...

...Literary school tread upon the heels of literary school, and whatever their mutual aversions they were united in common revolt against the norms of classical realism...

...It is to this tradition that Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs...

...Gogol was rediscovered and reinterpreted...

...If it is their fatality, it is also their strength...

...The 1890s and the years leading up to World War I and the Russian Revolution witnessed an eruption of creative energy in every field?painting, music, the theater, philosophy, science...

...Thus Miss Ginsburg has made available for the first time, at least to American readers, a broad-ranging collection of stories by an important modern writer who cannot be heard in his own country...